How and Why ‘It’s Always Sunny’ Made Frank a Golden Bachelor

Spoilers follow for the 17th season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, through finale episode “The Golden Bachelor Live.” 

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has asked a lot of Danny DeVito. Over nearly two decades on the FX comedy, he has been sewn into a couch and stuck in a playground coil, gotten lost at sea, bathed in hand sanitizer, and terrorized a number of the series’s secondary characters. The Always Sunny writers have for so long dreamed up outlandish scenarios for Frank — with DeVito’s enthusiastic acceptance — that when the script for “The Golden Bachelor Live” arrived, he thought it was just another bit of fiction until his daughters, fans of The Bachelor universe, helped set him straight.

“I was unaware of the fact that there was such a show,” DeVito says of The Golden Bachelor. “I thought they made it up at first because they always come at me with these outrageous Frank things. But I like that kind of stuff: getting hit with a brick or falling out of a window, the most crazy things that I never get to do in real life. The crazier, the better.”

This 17th season of It’s Always Sunny was one of the series’s funniest, sharpest, and nastiest in years, in large part because these eight episodes return to a core series conceit: Frank as the Gang’s enabler and torturer. Frank cons his younger counterparts into thinking he’s dying; tricks his children into masturbating a dog to win a bet; and signs up for The Golden Bachelor, hoping to find a hot young thing to date, without telling the group. In the season’s back half, Frank’s time on the reality show thrusts the Gang into an obsessive tailspin: In addition to giving one of these women a rose, will he give her his money, too, and spend his time with her instead of getting up to hijinks with them?

Season finale “The Golden Bachelor Live,” written by It’s Always Sunny producers and actors Rob Mac and Charlie Day, addresses those questions with the season’s second crossover episode. Shot in the actual Bachelor mansion and on a set built to mimic The Golden Bachelor’s studio, helmed by actual Golden Bachelor host Jesse Palmer, and featuring a Taxi reunion between DeVito and actress Carol Kane, “The Golden Bachelor Live” gives Frank a glimmer of sincerity in a season otherwise committed to his usual debauchery.

From the beginning, Day says, Sam was written with Kane in mind: “I don’t ever remember thinking of anyone other than her.”
Photo: Patrick McElhenney/FX

This season already began with a crossover episode: “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary,” the second part of the series’s much-publicized overlap with ABC’s hit sitcom. There was a long public buildup to “Volunteers” and “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary,” with It’s Always Sunny creator Mac and Abbott Elementary creator Quinta Brunson teasing it for months. The Golden Bachelor crossover, revealed when the season’s trailer was released in late June, was comparatively hush-hush. But the It’s Always Sunny writers’ room tackled both episodes in August and September 2024, with The Golden Bachelor idea coming from Mac, whose wife and co-star Kaitlin Olson had started watching the show. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we had a crossover event with Abbott Elementary but then did another crossover?” Mac remembers thinking. “Because that seems like the very Sunny thing to do, which is to double down on the ridiculousness.” Once the room was committed to the crossover, Mac screened The Golden Bachelor’s season one premiere and finale episodes so the writers could study the show’s episodic structure.

Frank’s love interests began to take shape, too. He’d be fascinated by Cock Chewa, the series’s satirical spin on the infamous sex-positive online personality Hawk Tuah, who Mac points to as an example of Sunny being “just asymmetrically off of popular culture.” Purposefully, the series doesn’t “miss the boat by a few minutes; we miss it by like, four years” to reflect the Gang’s general out-of-touch nature, he says. While Cock Chewa would pique Frank’s voracious sexual appetites, he’d find himself opening up emotionally to Sam, an age-appropriate chicken heiress who could match Frank’s freakiness. (She kept her dead husband’s penis and pickled it.) From the beginning, Day says, Sam was written with Kane, DeVito’s co-star on the sitcom Taxi, in mind: “I don’t ever remember thinking of anyone other than her.”

When Mac and Day told DeVito about their Golden Bachelor plan, he was most excited for Frank to “wind up with a little love interest,” he says. Cock Chewa or Sam would be a chance at redemption for Frank, whose romantic history on the show isn’t great: He had a toxic relationship with Dennis and Dee’s mother; his “pretty woman” Roxy (Alanna Ubach) died; and for years, he’s strung along Charlie’s mother, Bonnie, played by the late Lynne Marie Stewart, who would appear in the episode to interrupt Frank’s dalliances with Cock Chewa and Sam and present herself as a third romantic option. Neither Mac nor Day knew then that this would be Stewart’s final appearance on the show; the episode closes with a Bonnie montage and “For our sweet Lynne … ” dedication. (“Because of the nature and tone of Sunny, it’s really challenging to put together a fitting tribute for someone that you love and care about. We did our best and hope that fans of the show really appreciate her and what she contributed,” Mac says. “Talk about someone that could just improvise and was fast on their feet and funny. She was really the best,” adds Day.)

On the series’s behalf, DeVito reached out to Kane, whom he knew before her casting as Andy Kaufman’s wife on Taxi. Kane then shared the episode’s script with her mother, seeking her thoughts. “She was so shocked by the language,” Kane says with a laugh. “She said to me, ‘Honey, why would you do this?’ And I said, ‘Mommy, because it’s Danny and that’s the nature of the show.’ For her, it was like reading a porn movie or something.” Kane, however, was drawn to Sam’s combination of self-confidence and vulnerability and accepted the offer to be “Danny’s, as he would probably put it, main squeeze.”

Like DeVito, Kane didn’t know that The Golden Bachelor was a real show: “You can’t even believe that people, especially people of The Golden Bachelor age, are actually going to throw their lives up in the air like that and commit themselves to a stranger. It’s such a wild concept,” she says of her reaction. To prepare, she watched a few episodes, as well as the “incredible” appearances from her friends Kaufman and Paul Reubens on The Dating Game.

Meanwhile, Mac cleared the crossover episode with ABC Entertainment executive Robert Mills. “We sent the scripts to all the Golden Bachelor producers and then we just got back, ‘Approved.’ The golden gates were open,” Mac says. He suspects part of the reason for the speedy assent was because the episode is clearly mocking Frank and the Gang rather than anyone affiliated with The Golden Bachelor. “As always, we were the butt of the joke. We’re never making fun of the show itself,” Mac says of It’s Always Sunny’s various parodies of other TV shows, which, this season, included Is It Cake?, Succession, and The Bear. “We’re never making fun of any one individual or anybody else other than ourselves.”

For season 17’s two crossovers, director Todd Biermann strove “to be respectful and lean into the style of what they do on their show” to amplify the chaos the Gang brings when entering those other worlds.
Photo: Patrick McElhenney/FX

To direct the episode, the It’s Always Sunny team turned to Todd Biermann, a longtime member of their creative crew who went to high school with Mac and has, since season eight, been a recurring director for the series. “Before there was a TV show, I knew those guys,” Biermann says. “I actually tried to cast Rob on an episode of Trading Spaces when he was a struggling actor and writer. That’s how I first saw what became It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Biermann was originally slated to direct three episodes this season: the premiere, sixth episode “Overage Drinking: A National Concern,” and the finale. But Biermann’s brother, Eric, unexpectedly died the day before his work on the season began, so Biermann directed only the bookends — which happened to be both crossovers. “Those episodes were ironically supposed to look like lost episodes of different shows. My experience in reality TV certainly helped my experience in directing, as did doing over 20 different shows of scripted comedy,” Biermann explains. “That gives me a lot of stylistic versatility because most directors are guest directors; you’re doing different styles and genres of shows.”

Key to ensuring that “The Golden Bachelor Live” felt like an actual episode of the series was recreating the dating show’s most recognizable elements. It’s Always Sunny got The Golden Bachelor host Jesse Palmer on board, and secured the use of The Bachelor mansion in Agoura Hills. (“They literally and metaphorically opened up their doors to us,” Mac says.) For the in-studio portion of the episode, the It’s Always Sunny crew built a slightly smaller copy of The Golden Bachelor’s studio on one of their Fox soundstages. And after consulting with The Golden Bachelor’s lighting and camera teams, It’s Always Sunny used the same lighting design, camera models, and lens package to further mimic the reality show’s look.

“Reality, especially a big stage show like that, could use up to a dozen cameras at a time. We roll three. Most shows use two cameras in scripted,” Biermann says. That additional camera gave them a little more coverage and creative license as they filmed their mash-up of It’s Always Sunny’s tone with The Golden Bachelor’s format, he explains. “We get to step outside the box a little bit,” Biermann says of both crossover episodes, which are primarily in the style of the respective other series. At the same time, in recreating Abbott Elementary’s mockumentary approach and The Golden Bachelor’s in-studio interludes, Biermann says the It’s Always Sunny team strove “to be respectful and lean into the style, the tone, and the aesthetic of what they do on their show” to amplify the chaos the Gang brings when entering these other worlds.

“We are trying to do a version, with our own spin, of their shows. Obviously, The Golden Bachelor does not generally lead with someone who could be considered one of the worst men of his generation,” Biermann says with a laugh. “It’s like, ‘Imagine the worst guy in the world being on The Golden Bachelor,’ and just going there.”

“Danny went on a couple of riffs, some you probably can’t print,” says Biermann of the episode’s limo arrivals scene.
Photo: Patrick McElhenney/FX

“The Golden Bachelor Live” filmed over five days in mid-November 2024 — a half-day longer than It’s Always Sunny usually films — to accommodate the episode’s different locations and the physical modifications required for the monstrous reveal that the Gang, in dumping gallons of Nair into the mansion’s hot tub, actually ended up injuring themselves. “They basically gave themselves the Cricket effect,” Biermann says, referencing It’s Always Sunny’s much-abused character Rickety Cricket. “They mutilated, tortured, burnt themselves, just with idiocy. And then they’d lean into it to riff endlessly on who was to blame for the stupidity.”

The episode features Palmer summarizing Frank’s time on The Golden Bachelor and includes clips from the Gang’s meetings with Cock Chewa and Sam. Within those scenes, Palmer plays the straight man while Frank struggles to decide whether Cock Chewa’s affinity for oral sex or Sam’s ball-busting will be more fulfilling in the long term. “You got to take your hat off to this guy,” DeVito says of Palmer’s willingness to roll with the episode’s absurdity. Biermann also expressed admiration for Palmer’s ability to stay in character, noting that he “broke less than Charlie” — possibly faint praise, since Biermann also says Day “breaks more than almost any comedic actor I’ve ever worked with.”

The episode hits all the typical The Golden Bachelor beats, most hilariously with its version of the customary limo arrivals, complete with a hosed-down driveway for better reflectivity and contrast on-screen, Biermann says. With an increasingly shocked Palmer by his side, Frank insults every older woman who reveals herself as a contestant until finally he’s cut everyone but Sam and Cock Chewa from the competition. Everything DeVito said during that scene, including the contemptuous “You could hear their pussies crackling … old meat,” was improvised. “Danny went on a couple of riffs, some you probably can’t print,” which had Biermann and Day “crying with bellyaches” on set, Biermann says. “Let’s just say that he was being the dirtiest-old-man version of himself with his character’s opinion of the sexual prowess of the women contenders that were being presented. I think this is probably the least obnoxious way that I could say that.”

Kane was on set for all five days, she says, running lines with DeVito (during a break from filming, she met his baby grandson, Carmine), connecting with Stewart over their shared memories of Reubens, and gamely jumping into improv with Howerton and Olson. “I was lucky because I had finished a movie, Between the Temples, that had a lot of improvisation in it, which I was not at all used to doing,” Kane says. “I was a little less afraid of it than I might have been if I hadn’t done that movie.” In the episode’s final sequence, Frank realizes he made a mistake by dumping Sam, runs through a rainstorm to the bus that Sam has boarded to leave Philadelphia, gives her the golden rose, and kisses her as Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind” plays. The scene was physically demanding, with rain machines pouring on DeVito and Kane and Kane slipping on the bus’s bottom step. But “it’s a gift to be doing that kind of stuff with someone you trust and know so long because you can be open with them and they can be open with you,” Kane says.

Kane’s chemistry with DeVito was so prickly and charming that it inspired a major change to the planned episode. In Mac and Day’s original script, Sam and Frank do kiss — but there were a few final buttons filmed for the episode that would have ended it in a more darkly comedic, even fatal, way and constrained Sam and Cock Chewa to one-episode characters. Day and Mac say they realized while filming and editing that there was more potential in leaving the door open for the women’s return, so the episode ends with Frank and Sam’s satisfying embrace, and when the season 18 writers’ room opens in October, they’ll talk about where to go with Sam and Cock Chewa. “I imagine we’ll probably want to use both of them because they were so funny. In what capacity we use them, I have no idea,” Day says. “But I would be very surprised if we walked into the room and were like, ‘Well, we’re done with those actors.’”

“The writers understood that Carol knocked it out of the park,” DeVito adds. “I’m looking forward to doing another show with her. We have our fingers crossed for that.”

It’s Always Sunny isn’t always sincere, but when it is — like with Mac’s coming-out dance in season 13 — those moments come from a real place of affection for these characters. DeVito is 80 years old now, Kane 73, and their characters taking a chance on each other suggests that love is possible at any age, a sentiment that doesn’t quite counterbalance all of Frank’s established awfulness but does affirm that the series is still willing to try new things 20 years in. “Usually, we do Gang shows. But everybody has their moment to soar,” DeVito says of this season’s focus on Frank and the suggestion within “The Golden Bachelor Live” that romantic happiness could await him. “I’ve always told them over the years, ‘The farther out, the better. Just keep pushing the envelope. Slime me in whitey-tighties, man; it’s fine with me.’” And of the series’s future past season 18? “We’ll do it until they rip it from us. That’s what I figured. Art is never finished. It’s abandoned, or they cut the legs out from under you,” DeVito says. “We like to ride, and we like to keep riding. I can’t wait for the first day of the new season. It’ll really be a ball.”