
To those of you who follow me on the posting website, it will come as little surprise that my favorite show still currently on TV is the wonderful institution known as “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”. I have been watching this particular program my entire adolescent and adult life, and it has never let me down even once (well, maybe the one where they sing the whole episode). I’ve seen people compare it to “a modern day Seinfeld”, which in my mind is a scurrilous and unfounded attack, given that Seinfeld couldn’t hold a candle to the storytelling, character development, heartbreak and majesty of Always Sunny. It is the perfect ensemble comedy, and as with all ensembles, one character stands out from the rest - you already know who I mean, but for the sake of indulging any morons who may be reading this: it’s Charlie.
Over the dozen seasons of the show thus far, pretty much all of the characters have become wildly more focused in their singular weirdness than they started out in season 1 and 2. At the beginning of the show, Dennis was a little vain, Mac was a bit quirky and trimmed the sleeves of his t-shirts, and Dee was just straight-up normal and sympathetic. Smash cut to season 13, where they have respectively become a serial killer (we all agree that’s what’s happening right?), a dildo-pounding-sex-bike-owner, and a cartoonishly pathetic loser who everyone shits all over. Frank went from being mildly interested in strip clubs to the most batshit pervert conceivable, just getting masharound-handjos from his (not biological!) niece. But Charlie has remained remarkably consistent throughout the show, while still growing as a person right before our eyes.
If you recall in season 4 when the gang is busy solving the gas crisis, Charlie caps the episode by bailing out of a fuel-packed “spyvan” and screaming “Wild Card, bitches! YEEEEEHAWWWWW!!” in his iconic and pitch-perfect Dallas accent. I remember first seeing that episode as a teenager and clutching at my heart like Rush Limbaugh after his second breakfast ribeye. I had honestly never laughed so hard at something in my life - maybe not since. The rest of the Paddy’s crew, still in the nascent stages of their journey to strangeness, react as normal people would to this happening. They were still caterpillars waiting to enter their weirdo cocoons. Charlie was a full-fledged freak butterfly, operating on a level of theatrical insanity that his friends would not achieve for several more seasons, if ever.

This is not to say that Charlie has developed less throughout the show than his compatriots - quite the opposite in fact. While everyone else in the gang was busy getting more and more focused in their creepy qualities, Charlie has grown emotionally throughout the show’s run not only in his complexity as a character, but in the affection we the audience feel for him. We see him create a full-fledged musical from scratch, become a genius through nothing but sugar pills, run rings around a local health inspector, and manipulate a rich heiress simply to grow closer to the waitress he loves so deeply. He is revealed to have emotional highs and lows far beyond any of his friend’s capabilities, and because he is just so goddamn adorable, those become our highs and lows as well.

He is the only character you actively root for, and justifiably so - Charlie’s happiness is derived from simple pleasures like becoming the notorious GreenMan, drinking sunscreen on his first trip to the beach, smashing rats with his Walking-Dead-esque baseball bat (for the record Walking Dead absolutely stole that bat idea). Dennis derives pleasure from sexual deviance and sociopathy. Mac derives it from neediness and a deep misunderstanding of religion. Dee only experiences fleeting moments of joy from her delusions before reality crashes down around her. But Charlie? Charlie is pure and good - light itself if we’re being honest. And at the end of the day, we are all Charlie. Who amongst us hasn’t eaten a whole block of cheese? Who hasn’t come up with a silly invention like Kitten Mittens? Who wouldn’t love to play a rousing game of Nightcrawlers© with their best pal? I know I would.
As the show marches on and we grow closer and closer to the inevitable conclusion of the gang’s adventures (although obviously I hope that is some considerable time from now), I find myself increasingly confident that Charlie will be the sole character who emerges “ok”. While he may have finally landed his dream babe (waitress, still don’t know her name), only to realize that he did not actually love her - this represents a huge emotional shift for Charlie as a character. An early season Charlie would never have the strength to realize that his crush wouldn’t work out, and would have likely stayed with the waitress until one of them died. But as he has emotionally and spiritually transformed throughout the years we have followed his journey, he is newly capable of realizing what makes him happy, and more importantly - what doesn’t. He is Don Quixote - seemingly unaware of how so much of the world works, but absolutely certain of his place in it.
In the iconic film “Shrek”, the titular Ogre explains to his wise-cracking donkey friend that “Ogres are like onions”. This is a lie. It’s a lie not because Ogres aren’t real (they are), but because it is a much more apt description of Charlie than Shrek. Every encounter we the audience have with the character brings new light, new dimension to our beautiful boy. We eventually come to see him as a flawed but ultimately perfect human being - yet also one burdened with a crippling level of empathy and emotion. His sadness becomes our sadness - his victories become our victories. When he bails out of that van in the gas crisis episode, we are more excited to see Charlie living his best life than we are concerned for the safety of his friends, left panicking and trapped in the rolling bomb he had created for them. Because the show is ultimately *about* Charlie, and everyone else is just there because he wants them to be.