Created by Rob McElhenney, the FXX comedy series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is back for its 13th season, with Mac (McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day), Dee (Kaitlin Olson) and Frank (Danny DeVito) up to their usual duplicitous scheming. Even with Dennis (Glenn Howerton) taking on the new role of father in North Dakota, this group of lovable screw-ups will have no shortage of new adventures, as Mac explores his newfound sexuality, Charlie hopes to have a child with The Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), Dee takes her feminism to new heights, and Frank gets into all sorts of trouble.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, actor Charlie Day talked about how rare it is to have so many seasons with one TV series, the job security It’s Always Sunny has given him throughout his young adult life, having total freedom to tell the stories they want to tell, the challenges of making this series, the busier the cast gets, what fans can expect from Season 13, how they’re dealing with the absence of Glenn Howerton, aka Dennis, and how their 14th season will match the record with Ozzie & Harriet, for the longest running live-action comedy series, ever.

its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-charlie-day-interview-season-13
Image via FX

Collider: When you first started making It’s Always Sunny, if somebody had told you that you’d be here, 13 seasons later, would you have thought they were completely insane?

CHARLIE DAY: I would have thought they were completely insane, but I think that’s the pessimist in me. I can’t picture the future very well. We made a pilot and the hope was that we would get a chance to make a season. But beyond that, it has surpassed all of my expectations.

Through a big chunk of your career, you’ve had this show to come back to. What’s it like to know, especially in a business like this, that you had that job still waiting there.

DAY: Yeah, a wonderful and rare thing in this town is job security, and to have had that for what will be 14 years is amazing. It’s through the better chunk of my young adult life, I suppose, or however you would categorize your late 20s to early 40s. Then, to get to make whatever we want, that’s the other refreshing thing. We go around town, either working with someone else where you don’t have control, or begging someone to give you the control to make something. It’s wonderful to have this blank check of creativity that FX gives us when they say, “Go make a season of television,” and I’ve had that for years.

It feels like this show has been there since the beginning of FX.

DAY: In some ways, it has. We were very early in.

How much harder does it get to make this show, season after season, as you guys get busier and busier?

it's-always-sunny-charlie-day-kaitlin-olson-danny-devito
Image via FX

DAY: Yeah, that gets harder, juggling our professional lives and our personal lives, with children and stuff. Other things, like fatiguing or aging aspects of our production, whether it be crew members or just general fatigue of the actual work of filming, takes its toll. But then, other things get easier. It gets easier to figure out how to break a story and how to allocate our time. We’ve gotten much better at that. We don’t waste a lot of time anymore. We come and we work hard, and then we leave. We put the pencils down, so to speak.

Do you feel like part of the success of this show comes from the fact that you’re not afraid to offend anyone because you’re equal opportunity offenders?

DAY: I think so. When we decided to make a show satirizing bad behavior and the worst aspects of ourselves, as a country, and just as humans, in general, we stumbled into a formula that allows us to go down some roads that you just can’t go down on other shows. As the world becomes a more complex place and we have to figure out how to deal with these issues, it’s almost refreshing to have these characters to say, “Hey, wait, we can still deal with these issues in a funny way ‘cause the show is commenting on the worst sides of ourselves.” Then, you get to see the worst sides of ourselves and laugh at it, which is what I think people need.

Is there anything that you’ve ever worried about doing, that you thought seemed too crazy, but you still got away with it?

DAY: No. We get asked that question a lot and not really because you understand, as the writers of the show, that we’re saying, “Hey, this is wrong.” We’re not glorifying these characters. They don’t win. To say this or to feel this way is wrong. The characters often discuss the nuances of those things, in a way that I think is interesting for the audience to hear. As long as we feel like we’re addressing it in the story, from that more thoughtful place, then I feel that we usually can get away with it.

always-sunny-season-13-images
Image via FX

Have you had that freedom since day one, as far as how far you can push things, or do you feel like you needed to have people get to know the characters and love them a little bit first, before you started pushing it further?

DAY: I think FX urged us to push things even further in our first season than we were comfortable doing, dealing with episodes that were more outwardly topical than we were going to pitch them and write. On the one hand, I think that hurt the show because there was a misconception that this was just shock humor, but on the other hand, it’s what made the show last as long as it has. It made us better writers because we started to approach the writing from that more thoughtful position of, “Well, what do we have to say?” Not every episode is a statement on something, but the ones that are, usually are elevated in way because they’re saying something a little poignant.

What can fans of this show expect with Season 13?

DAY: They can expect to keep doing what we’ve been doing, which is writing for these characters, enjoying their despicable behavior, and watching them dig themselves into holes that they can’t get out of. It’s just another great, funny season. We’re starting the season with a really strong episode. I’m really happy with the first one.

What is different for your character this season, and what is exactly the same for him?

DAY: When the season starts out, he’s in a relationship with the Waitress, who’s played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis, my wife. He’s been pursuing this woman for 12 seasons, so he starts out in a very different place. But in typical Sunny fashion, he’s gonna work himself back to where he started. It was fun to explore that different dynamic for the two characters.

What’s it like now that you can’t have Glenn Howerton around, in the same capacity as before?

it's-always-sunny-charlie-day
Image via FX

DAY: We never want to do the show without him, although we have such a deep bench of great performers over the 13 years in the show that we’ve found ourselves being able to write some great episodes that focus more on them. It was exciting to write these episodes and watch these people shine. We did an all female reboot of the Wade Boggs episode, where the gang gets on a plane and tries to break Wade Boggs’ drinking record. We used Kaitlin [Olson], Artemis [Pebdani], Mary Elizabeth, Rob’s mother, and my mother, and they’re all on this plane. It’s such a great episode. It was really fun to write for them. It was exciting, in a creative way, which was to say, “Okay, what are some other ways to break stories that wouldn’t involve Dennis or us?” There are always different challenges that are coming at you, all the time. We’ve done episodes without Danny [DeVito] and episodes without Kaitlin because of one reason or another, and they were great episodes. In fact, I thought it was less likely to have the entire cast intact for 14 years, for every single episode. It’s more likely that you mix it up a little bit.

Is there anything that you can get away with in Season 13 that you couldn’t have gotten away with doing before?

DAY: What we can get away with in Season 13 is that we can disrupt the format of the show, and we can take an episode and tell it in a very different style than how we traditionally tell an episode. We’ve done that, over the years. I think we’ve earned the right to do that. We actually hit a few real emotional beats this year, which is very rare for us. That was exciting, to be able to write those, and see which ones worked and which ones didn’t.

There was a little bit of a longer break between Seasons 12 and 13, since you guys were all so busy. Will there be the same kind of break between Seasons 13 and 14, or do you want to try to get Season 14 on sooner?

DAY: That was a product of us being busy, but also of us wanting to get the show back on in the fall. WE got into this pattern where we would shoot the show in the summer, and then we would just sit on those episodes until January. A lot happens in the world, in six months, and we didn’t want to be writing things that were so far behind what was happening in the world. We said, “Look, we want to push back to the fall schedule.” That’s why we’re off from January to the next January, and then now on in the fall. We were off for the same amount of time. We just added six months from when we last aired.

A 14th season of this show will match the record with Ozzie & Harriet, for the longest running live-action comedy series, ever.

DAY:  That’s crazy!

What’s it like to be in that kind of company, with this show?

DAY: It’s exciting! I’m very proud of the show. I’m happy with it, and I still love doing it. It’s exciting to be in the record books, but at the same time, I take everything with a grain of salt. Those shows did like 30 episodes a season. If nothing else, it’s been great just to be a part of the television landscape and a part of the culture for so long, and to work our way into this zeitgeist. I’m very proud of that.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia airs on Wednesday nights on FXX.

its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-season-13-poster
Image via FX