With It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s recent Season 16 finale, the FX series capped off another record-setting year as TV’s longest-running live-action comedy. Though the dynamics among the gang, Charlie, Mac, Dee, Dennis and Frank, haven’t changed much over all those seasons, the series’ relationship with its audience has.
And nowhere is that change more immediately evident than in the series’ key art.
“The more time you spend with any relationship, the deeper and wider and higher that a relationship can go,” Stephanie Gibbons, the head of FX marketing, told Adweek. “I think it’s always a thrill to market new IP, but it’s also a privilege to market returning content because there’s more shared common ground.”
Gibbons has been with FX throughout It’s Always Sunny’s run, and the exec gave Adweek an inside look at how the show’s marketing evolved since its 2005 debut.
Season 1
Long before kitten mittens or even Danny DeVito, the inaugural Always Sunny art featured the gang looking more like a parody of Friends or Entourage than what the show would become. Gibbons recalled that Season 1 involved working with gallery photography and that the marketing was “a little resource constricted at the time.”
“It was a very different time. The comedies were very nascent at FX and had very contained budgets,” Gibbons said. “I think the feeling was they were a group of young cohorts and friends in Philadelphia bars, so it felt like the show was Lo-Fi, the way they were doing it.”
Season 2
