It only doesn’t make sense until you realize It’s Alway’s Sunny In Philadelphia is Veep but dressed up in enough character comedy and narrowed down to small enough of the hellscape that it doesn’t become too bitter and overwhelming to swallow.

The problem is if we accept It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia as serious “high art” and not just crude character humor the criticism of our way of life becomes too biting.

The thesis of Veep was “American power is a structure of dangerous idiots all the way down” and thesis of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is “Imagine if these idiots weren’t too incompetent and selfish to constantly be barred from access to any actual power for any extended length of time?”.

It is much easier to lean into the laughs with the latter critique but it requires a forgetting of the fact that there is inevitably an environment around the characters in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia that for some reason does not seem to notice how catastrophic these characters are and there is never any cohesive attempt to contain the damage these characters do by the community around them… and the only real reason that could drive that degree of egregious distraction is a mirror catastrophic breakdown around the characters of the social fabric of society/social contract.

It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia in other words can be thought of as an end of the world play put on by cockroaches in the rubble to mock the behavior of the rich and powerful who drove the world into ruin by behaving exactly the way the hyperbolic theatrical characters the cockroaches act out behave. We all love this, but in order to love it without the cynicism we have to make the politics subconscious and move it back to serve as the stage set for clown-like characters that distract us with comedic spectacle that still conveys the message.