politically incorrect scrapes
Last week, I watched FOX’s rerun of the FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and I thought it was dumb. After Time TV critic James Poniewozik’s glowing recommendation, I decided to tune in to the second season’s premiere last night. Besides, I thought it was my duty as a former Philadelphian and student of media to see how the City of Brotherly Shove is represented on screen.
At first I was inclined to think that the only think Philly about “Sunny” was b-roll of the city and references to places — the opening titles feature postcard shots of obvious landmarks like the Ben Franklin bridge, Logan Circle, the art museum, and South Street — but I realized the show had a Philadelphian sensibility after all. The humor of the show isn’t really my style, but I found myself laughing. As I laughed I realized that I was laughing not so much because I thought it was funny, but because it was something my friend Jay would think is funny. Jay is a transplant from Tulsa to Philly and found it easy to fit into the culture of the city, something I wasn’t able to do. I was laughing because I knew Jay would be laughing. I realized that his humor is probably more in tune with the city’s than mine. Other Philadelphians probably enjoy the crude sensibility.
The second episode aired last night also included a plot point that might not be unique to Philadelphia, but certainly reflected the character of the city. A new neighbor buys the property next door to the bar owned by the ensemble of main characters. He informs them that the deed includes property 400 feet into the bar. Thanks to surveying errors or custom, this demarcation had been ignored, and the land had been a part of the bar’s building. The new owner wanted to evict the owners from his land. (This is something that would actually happen in Philly.) I won’t reveal how the issue is resolved, but it certainly reflected the character of one of America’s oldest cities.
There are plenty of things that seem out of place in a show about Philly. The bar is vastly larger than any bar I visited in the city, none of the characters have obvious Philadelphia accents, and there aren’t any black people in the show. The show doesn’t convey the sense of claustrophobia and tension I felt when I lived there, but, for a TV show, it does an admirable job of reflecting “the real” Philadelphia.
[…] In an earlier post, I praised the FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” for doing a decent job of representing life in the city, but one of tonight’s episodes, “The Gang Runs for Office” had an erroneous detail that I thought was worth commenting on. In this episode, the gang convinces Dennis to run for South Philly District 37 Comptroller in an effort to scam his opponent into bribing him. In one scene, Mac walks in on Charlie shooting Dennis with a cheap consumer camcorder and asks what’s going on. Charlie tells Mac, “we’re going to shoot a commercial and get it on public access.” Alarm bells went off in my head because Philadelphia is the largest city in the country without a public access system. If the show were written by people in New York or LA, I might forgive this error, but much of the purported charm of the show is that it was created by people from Philadelphia, a city often off the cultural radar. This mistake strikes me as particularly strange because the show started as an amateur project distributed online. Did the creators never look into producing a public access show? […]