They’ve lied, cheated, stolen, kidnapped, destroyed a home, exploited a religious phenomenon, adopted a crack addiction just for the welfare checks, and, once, made Danny DeVito wear skinny jeans. Are the highly motivated, impossibly ineffectual schemers of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — the virtuosically absurd FX comedy set in a South Philly dive bar — fit to raise a child? We may soon find out: The show’s sixth season, scheduled for premiere in the fall, is shooting now, and Kaitlin Olson, who plays the put-upon bar waitress Sweet Dee, is very, very pregnant. That means that, yes, as some have speculated, Sweet Dee will be with child on next season’s Sunny.
Charlie Day — who writes and co-stars in the show (as maniacal fan favorite Charlie Kelly) alongside Rob McElhenney (karate aficionado Mac) and Glenn Howerton (ladies’ man Dennis) — says “the best way to work around is to write to it. So, outside a few loose shirts in the beginning of filming, we’ve written to it, and it was one of the motivating factors of why we’re stringing a few episodes together.†(The show’s plotlines are, for the most part, wrapped up, in some creatively destructive fashion, usually both physically and emotionally, by the end of each episode.) “The character will be pregnant.†But … how the hell is that going to work? “The only detail I can give you is that we’ll have a really fun episode trying to figure out, ‘who done it?’â€
In real life, the father-to-be is more obvious: That’d be McElhenney, who married Olson in 2008. So what does he think about working his progeny into the plot? “By the next block she’s going to be seven-and-a-half-months pregnant,†he says. “There’s no hiding that! We spent weeks and weeks talking about, ‘How are we going to deal with this?’†Fret not, Sunny fanatics, the gang is not taking the development lightly: “When you bring a baby into the dynamic of a television cast it changes everything.â€