Ever since its debut all the way back in 2005, Rob Mac’s brainchild It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which he co-developed alongside Glenn Howerton) has built an increasingly depraved and hilarious world. And, through Mac, Howerton, Charlie Day, Kaitlin Olson, and Danny DeVito, each member of the Paddy’s Pub Gang has been played to perfection. Heartless, selfish, deceptive, manipulative, foul-mouthed perfection. None of the five members of the Gang could really be called a good person, but their badness does range. They all lie, they all seem to lack empathy, none of them get along particularly well with their parents, and each one of them wouldn’t hesitate to mess over someone outside the Gang for a buck.
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But which one is truly the worst individual? In seventeen years, most of them have changed to some degree, though not for the better, and by this point it’s clear where each one of them stands.
5) Charlie
Of the It’s Always Sunny Gang, Charlie is the dumb one, not the evil one. He’s the result of a failed abortion, which likely caused him some problems, and those are problems he’s only exacerbated by huffing glue all the live long day. But overall, his heart is very frequently in the right place. For instance, in Season 1’s “Charlie Got Molested” he turned in the McPoyle brothers for trying to frame a former teacher of theirs.
If there’s one standout thing about Charlie that really stands out as not so great, it’s his stalking of the waitress. He follows her, adds chemicals to her shampoo, and even wrote a whole disturbing play just as a front to propose to her, which she swiftly rejected. Like the others, Charlie is rude to strangers, but he’s still easily the best human being of the five.
4) Mac
No member of the gang has developed more over the years than Mac. But one thing has always stayed the same, which is his neediness, undoubtedly the product of his neglectful parents. He was also, for a long time, quite confused about who he was, with his latent homosexuality clashing with the religious upbringing he took more seriously than anything else.
But compared to a few other members of the group, Mac isn’t so bad. His biggest crimes are repeatedly hitting on men who have expressed their lack of interest in him, turned Country Mac’s funeral into a pathetic display of his own neediness, ratted out his peers when he was younger, and slept with Dennis’ prom date on prom night, then claimed it was Tim Murphy. Deviant behavior, sure, but the worst thing he’s done is allowed his dog, Dennis Jr., to starve then fed the dog’s remains to Dennis.
3) Frank
In Season 2’s “Dennis and Dee Get a New Dad,” Frank understandably flips out when his ex-wife, Barbara, reveals that Dennis and Dee are not in fact his biological children. Many people would react with anger and yelling. However, Frank then almost immediately proceeds to tell Dennis and Dee that he in no way sees them as his kids. That’s pretty cold.
In other words, Frank wasn’t a particularly great human being even before he started to dive into the world of drugs and booze and living in squalor. He was already a selfish man who by his own admission started a company that doesn’t even do anything. And, when he is brought back in to save that company, he secretly sells it and dispassionately tells all the employs to get out. Even still, Frank gets some points for trying to understand Mac’s homosexuality and his genuine compassion for Charlie.
2) Dee
In the first season of the show, Sweet Dee Reynolds is the “Straight woman” surrounded by three depraved peers. In spite of Olson’s formidable talent, Dee just came across as a bland voice of reason. The began to change right at the beginning of Season 2, when she faked a disability just like Mac, Dennis, and Charlie.
And, in time, Dee has become arguably the most depraved member of the group. For instance, she misleads Rickety Cricket in Season 2, making him leave the church and begin his descent into the gutter. Then in Season 6’s “Mac and Charlie: White Trash” she berates a pool attendant and blows a booger out at him, claims a surrogate baby as a dependent to scam the government in Season 7, and ties a waiter’s shoelaces together and laughs at his pain in Season 8. Then there’s the revelation in Season 9 that she once burned her roommate after copying her Single White Female style.
Lastly there’s “PTSDee” in Season 12, which features the most cruelly manipulative thing any member of the Gang has done. She gets upset when a male exotic dancer calls sleeping with her his rock bottom, so she pretends to be his rock, getting him out of debt and promising to reunite him with his estranged daughter. And to a degree she does assist with the latter. Unfortunately, it’s by having him dance for a group of young women in a darkened Paddy’s Pub. One of those young women just happens to be his daughter, who currently has his thong-covered genitals right in her face. Dee flips on the lights and cackles.
1) Dennis
Dennis Reynolds gets a few points for his decision in Season 12’s “Dennis’ Double Life.” He finds out a fling resulted in a child and, after trying to evade responsibility for a while, he decides to be there for the kid, at least on his own terms and for as long as he sees fit. So, while that decision may prove he’s entirely rotten, there are still a few things that are fully irredeemable.
His treatment of women over the years has definitely been nothing short of manipulative. He even has a system tailored to winning a woman’s heart and, when she finally feels safe, leaving her in the rearview mirror. That would be bad enough to make Dennis rank high here, but what gets him the number one spot is an answer delivered in two parts. First is the fact that he’s turned his bedroom into some bizarre and horrifying sex-focused escape room…from which there is no escape. Then there’s his dynamic with Maureen Ponderosa, one of the series’ best supporting characters. He was always awful to her, sure, but he also almost certainly killed her. That’s never been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt but, let’s face it, he killed her.
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