How It’s Always Sunny’s Key Art Evolved to Showcase ‘Idiocy in All Its Perpetual Glory’

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

Season 2, which first featured actor Danny DeVito as Frank, also leaned more into creating a brand. Gibbons recalled that comedies weren’t usually branded at the time, with promotions generally consisting only of talent shots. So for Season 2, FX approached the branding “almost like a packaged good,” according to Gibbons.

“We wanted to go beyond just the faces. We also wanted there to be memory because we were all excited about the show. We wanted to give the show its own brand, essentially,” Gibbons said, adding, “It is packaging, and it was wanting it to have a palette that we could iterate against. That would also serve as a retinal flare for people.”

Season 3

Season 3 marks another milestone in Always Sunny’s marketing, with the art “starting to play into the characteristics” of the show, with caution tape covering the characters’ mouths.

“One of the things about them is they say the most heinously hysterical things, and they’re so incorrect in every realm,” Gibbons said. “You have to be able to have a deep understanding of the cultural landscape that we all live in and the nature of human denial and human rationalization and human ignorance and idiocy in all its perpetual glory.”

As the show went on, the art also continued evolving to showcase its perpetually glorious idiocy.

Seasons 4, 5 and 6

Seasons 4, 5 and 6 played off the Season 2 color palette. Gibbons described Season 4 as a “subversive” way to see smiling, happy faces, and Season 5 leaned into the cast’s chemistry as if they all “popped from the same zygote.”

Season 7

Season 7’s key art became a fan favorite for encapsulating the show’s journey thus far, including highlights such as the aforementioned mittens for kittens and showcasing the group as a dysfunctional family. And with Season 7 airing in 2011, the art happened at a time when social media sites such as Twitter were becoming increasingly popular.

“We started moving away from the heads, expanding the landscape into full figurative art. And there was a gentleman that used to head up our on-air, and he had this book of crazy album art that was just beyond hideous, and it was laugh-out-loud funny,” Gibbons said. “And the sites online when social media was taking off where you could see all these family pictures, and you were like, ‘Oh, my God. Who okayed this?’ We were just looking at families and grouping them together in their idiosyncratic collective, and we thought it would be great because they are a family.”

Season 8

Season 8 took the gang’s color palette to a new level, showcasing the group in another family-style photo full of blank looks and blonde hair. Season 8 promos also famously showcased a “replacement” cast, with the gang being supposedly changed for actors such as Haley Joel Osment.

“It was a way to see them in a completely recognizable way but also lean into the ridiculous, so we dyed all their hair that crazy blonde and we started to really get into that realm of seeing them in different landscapes in scenarios where you still know the character so well,” Gibbons said. “But you’re like, ‘If I was at a medieval fair, which person would be the jester?’ You start playing with those characters and start having fun.”

Seasons 9, 10 and 11

In Seasons 9 and 10, Always Sunny brought parody to sincerity.

Season 9 emulated Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, showcasing “gravitas and cinematic art direction” along with “a ridiculous element that acted as the mitigating factor” in the form of a banana, Gibbons explained. Meanwhile, Season 10 parodied glam rock bands, who likely thought their looks were just fine… in the ’80s.

“In retrospect, you’re like, ‘Holy crap. How did they walk out of the house and not crumble under the shame?’” Gibbons said.

The Children of the Corn-like poster for Season 11 also played off the Always Sunny color palette and foreshadowed the now-iconic Season 11 episode Mac & Dennis Move to the Suburbs.

“I would venture to guess that it would be just as frightening if all the people from Sunny just moved into your town as your neighbors as it would be with the [Children of the Corn] kids,” Gibbons said.

Season 12

With Gibbons being “obsessed” with The Sound of Music, Season 12’s Sound of Music-inspired art was something she “always wanted to do.”

“It just seems like a fun way to bring them into this world,” the exec said, adding, “I love that idea of putting the familiar in unfamiliar landscapes and watching what happens, and I think the audience plays along with us and wonders how they’re going to see their favorite gang next.”

Season 13

The Season 13 art leaned into several elements of the show. For years, fans had wondered if Glenn Howerton’s Dennis was a secret serial killer, and there was speculation that Howerton could be leaving the production, which the smaller image of Dennis on the poster only fed into.

Plus, the art served as an homage to the Friday the 13th franchise.

“We liked the idea of playing into that, another long-running franchise, and it seems like it was just an ideal hybrid, and leaning into the pulpy over-the-top ’80s feel,” Gibbons said.

Seasons 14, 15 and 16

The art for the final seasons explored different mediums, with Season 14’s painterly style showcasing the characters as larger than life. Meanwhile, Season 15 preceded the group heading over to Ireland with over-the-top outfits. And Season 16 had the gang back home on the streets of Philadelphia.

“Checking out what people paint on their van, it’s like those awkward family pictures. It’s a way that you get a window into that world of what that person’s taste is and what they’re like,” Gibbons said of the Season 16 art. “It was just something really fun. It’s just interesting because you know exactly who’s going to be playing which part, and that’s part of the fun.”

Where things go next

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is renewed through Season 18, so where is the artwork heading next? Not even Gibbons knows.

“We do think in those terms of what will go best, what will at least be thematically symbiotic with the underpinnings that they’re dealing with storywise and what we can put out there image-wise,” Gibbons said, adding. “I can never say with Sunny because at any point we could decide to do something that just makes you laugh and makes you go, ‘Oh my God. Yes, we have to see the gang that way because it would be so perfect.’”