From satirizing North Korean proliferation to learning the pros and cons of gun control, the guys over at It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia sure know how to bring the funny. Executive producer/writer/actor Glenn Howerton sits down with Generation to talk about the show and inadvertently explains why you should be watching.
Generation: Over the summer, FX executives announced that the show was picked up for an additional 52 episodes, which includes the work being done on season four. Will the five recurring cast members be on board for all of these?
Glenn Howerton: That remains to be seen. His (Danny DeVito’s) contract works season to season. There’s certainly no guarantees. We’d have to get into that once the season’s finished, and we start talking about the next season. In terms of myself, Rob, and Charlie, and Kaitlin, we’re all contracted to do six seasons.
G: Sexism, incest, terrorism, drug addiction, statutory rape, pedophilia, sexual harassment, mental and physical handicaps, and Nazism are a few of the subject matter elements that have entertained us for the past three seasons. Can we expect upcoming and future episodes to continue this pattern of absurd hilarity?
GH: Oh yeah. That’s what we do. We take things to the heightened place that brings the funny. We’re just working on an episode right now where we essentially kidnap a guy. It’s kind of an accident, and then it spirals out of control. Once we kidnap him, we end up having to retrace our steps to cover up our tracks. And then we end up accidentally kidnapping somebody else to cover up the original kidnapping.
G: Although character relations and event history carry on from each episode’s consciousness to the next, it’s entirely possible for a new viewer to pick up what’s going on, and enjoy the material at any given point in the season. Did you consider any more consecutive alternatives for the show’s format at its inception?
GH: Actually, no. At its inception, quite the opposite. We fully intended for the show to be exactly the way you described it where you could pick up at any point and each episode sort of stands alone.
G: Do you find any difficulty in fitting what you want to do or say with a given episode into the 22-minute framework? As a corollary, any episodes in particular give you trouble?
GH: Very difficult. The truth is that at this point we are actually working with, I actually got this figure the other day, 19 minutes and 50 seconds of actual story content.
G: Is that a cut down from what you’ve previously worked with??
GH: I think we used to have closer to another minute and ten seconds above that. It’s been compressed because there’s been more time added for advertising and our credits have gotten slightly longer …we’ve had to add more people to the credit sequence.
G: Sinbad and Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 will be making cameo appearances when your character Dennis goes to rehab this season. Are any other celebrities stopping by the set?
GH: Well, we’ve got Fisher Stevens in an episode this year, which is pretty cool. He just did an episode with us where we delve in kidnapping a little bit. He’s the subject of that. There’s a young actor by the name of Keir O’ Donnell whose done a lot of movies lately, and his star is definitely rising right now.
G; How much of the footage that makes the final cut is scripted and about how much is cast improvisation?
GH: Well, we tend to adlib around the lines a lot. So in terms of actually scripted dialogue, exactly as scripted, maybe 40%. But some variation of whats been scripted, a very close variation of whats been scripted, I would say about 85-90% is pretty close to script.
G: As one of the executive producers, about how much time will you spend on the editing process for a given episode? Has it gotten easier with more experience as the seasons have gone on?
GH: It has gotten easier. We have gotten to the point where we’re comfortable. We’ve also been working with the same editors this entire time. I would say in the past it would take us anywhere from a week and a half to two and a half weeks to edit an episode. Now we’ve probably gotten it down to probably five days.
G: Can you tell us anything about the upcoming sci-fi comedy Boldly Going Nowhere of which you are retaining the role as an executive producer?
GH: Yeah, we’re actually spending a lot of time on that lately. We’re splitting up our Sunny and Boldly Going Nowhere duties pretty much 50-50 right now because we are developing the pilot and the pilot shoots starting November 3. It’s terrific, it’s such a funny and original show, I’m so excited. We’ve never had to deal with casting every single major character before because we were already three of the major character prior to this.
G: I’ve read that it’s kind of loosely about the off time on a space ship under a rogue captain.
GH: Yeah. It’s a work-place comedy, only it takes place on a spaceship as opposed to in an office building, however, there’s a little bit more of a blue collar element to it as well. There are the officers above deck, and then there are the people below deck because it’s a mining ship, so in some ways its kind of like a flying office building/oil rig. It’s a little bit more of the mundane, the day-to-day of what it would be like to work on a space ship and to be stuck with the same people for years on end.
G: Over the past three seasons we’ve seen your character take a girl to bed after her grandfather’s funeral, go to an abortion rally to meet women, fast for days on end because he thought his cheeks were fat, pretend to be crippled to gain public favor, and tell a girl he loved her so that he could sleep with her among other things. Will viewers get to see the vanity continue through season four?
GH: Oh, absolutely. We have an episode, a very bizarre episode, coming up this season in which it comes to light that my character’s written a memoir, and it’s entitled “Dennis Reynolds: An Erotic Memoir.”
