Rob McElhenney Explains Why Mac Took So Long to Come Out on 'Always Sunny'
The 14th season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia premieres on September 25, making it the longest-running live action sitcom on American television alongside The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Season 13 concluded with a format-busting extended dance sequence which turned the show on its head: while the Gang have experimented with musical numbers before, it's always been in the service of the show's transgressive comedy. This, however, was an earnest moment in which Mac (played by series creator Rob McElhenney) finally found the means with which to express himself and affirm his identity as a newly out gay man.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, McElhenney spoke about the decision to show Mac coming to terms with his sexuality on-screen so late in the show's run, when the characters' various traits had all otherwise become entrenched to the point of being stunted.
"It was actually born more out of his intense, ultraconservative, right-leaning principals," he said. "We were looking at Mac at one point, and I was like, 'He is such an arch-arch Catholic conservative when it suits him, and when it doesn’t, he drops that.' And most of the people I know in that camp tend to be fairly homophobic. So we began going down that road: Let’s satirize that hard Christian conservative who is also intensely homophobic. OK, so what’s the next step from there? And that’s when I thought, 'Let’s just make him gay.' What we realized is, if you look back over the seasons, it almost worked retroactively."
Gags about Mac's sexuality had long been one of the show's many running jokes, but just as the show had skewered racist and sexist viewpoints before, so too were viewers invited to laugh at the characters' homophobic comments, not with them.
"The joke wasn’t that Mac was gay, obviously. That would have been demeaning and offensive," he said. "The joke was that he was in the closet, and he refused to come out and doubled down on his homophobia. It was just poking fun at the hypocrisy of that... We weren’t creating a gay character for comedic effect, that was there just to be gay and to be funny because he was gay, but a very complex, very disturbed, very fucked-up and awful character, who happens to be gay. And we ran with that."
While Season 13 ended on a rare moment of grace, it's unlikely that the Gang will have learned any profound lessons by the time Season 14 begins. McElhenney concluded the interview by promising that fans will be getting "more of the same," although what that means is unclear when Always Sunny thrives on experimenting with style and genre. "You might scream at the TV in anger and rage, because it’s ruining your show, but I promise that that is why you like the show," he said. "Because you don’t know what you’re going to get."
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