It's Always Sunny Turns 15: The 15 Very Worst Things The Gang Has Ever Done

Paddy's Pub has been open for business for 15 years now... and it's kind of amazing that its owners aren't behind bars by now.

Yes, on this very day 15 years ago, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia premiered on FX, and since that fateful day, we've enjoyed watching selfish jerks Mac, Dennis, Charlie, Dee and Frank scheme their way through life for our amusement. With 14 seasons now in the books (and more on the way), they're still going strong — and that means they've left quite a trail of abhorrent misdeeds in their wake.

To celebrate Sunny's 15th birthday, we here at TVLine are taking a hard look at all 154 episodes and ranking the absolute worst things the Gang has done, from a moral perspective. They've certainly given us plenty to work with, so we're skipping past the run-of-the-mill verbal abuse and petty misdemeanors that figure into every Sunny episode and focusing on the biggies: the truly despicable actions that have caused lasting physical and psychological damage. (We're also focusing on specific incidents rather than ongoing crimes, like Dennis' reprehensible treatment of women and the way the Gang piles on poor Rickety Cricket. But those are plenty bad, too.)

So pour yourself a beer, cue up that catchy theme song and join us as we do a deep dive into the Sunny crew's most terrible moments... so far, anyway. (And if you want to play along at home, all 14 seasons of Sunny are available to stream now on Hulu.)

Yeah, this early episode — which saw Dennis and Frank use an old cop car and rented uniforms to pose as police officers and push people around, shaking them down for bribes — probably wouldn't make it to air these days. Charlie blew up the cop car, though, so the damage to the greater Philadelphia area was kept to a minimum.

It's bad enough that Paddy's Pub happily served up beers to underage high school students to boost its bottom line, but then the Gang went and got emotionally involved with the high schoolers (including a young Jaimie Alexander!), stirring up memories of their own terrible adolescences. Don't worry, though: They were still allowed to operate a drinking establishment for another 13 seasons!

No, the Sunny gang didn't limit their blackface usage to just one mere episode. Mac's oblivious Lethal Weapon makeup job — it's not blackface, they insist, it's "Danny Glover-face" — first showed up in Season 6, and then a Season 9 episode doubled down with Dee donning blackface to play Murtaugh's daughter. (For the record, these episodes have been pulled from Hulu. For obvious reasons.)

The Gang's relentless bullying of Bird... sorry, Dee is one of Sunny's most enduring running jokes, but this one was especially cruel: The guys duped Dee into thinking she'd hit it big as a stand-up comic, even setting up fake gigs and hooking her up with a fake agent, only to pull the rug out from under her and then laughing heartily at her crushed dreams. We kind of don't blame her for hating them so much.

This one gets bonus points for creativity: Dee was insulted when a former flame said sleeping with her was his "rock bottom," so she set out to make things even worse for him. The guy was a male stripper, so Dee arranged for him to give lap dances to a bevy of hooting ladies... including the guy's own daughter. Sometimes the most elaborate form of revenge is the sweetest.

The Gang didn't just stop at taking a restaurant critic hostage for (accurately) dubbing Paddy's Pub "the worst bar in Philadelphia." Of course not! They went ahead and took the guy's totally innocent neighbor hostage as well, along with his poor cat. See, when you start taking people hostage, these things tend to snowball on ya.

When Dee faced a pesky IRS audit, what did she do? Why, stage a funeral for a fictional baby that she can claim as a dependent, of course! It's a truly twisted notion, but at least no actual babies were harmed... which is more than we can say about several of the Gang's schemes.

This one gets bonus points because Charlie apparently didn't learn his lesson. First, he lied about having cancer to squeeze a pity date out of the Waitress, and later in the series, he put his mom in a bald wig and makeup to look sick so he could beg for cash: "Give me money. Money me. Money now." (She was lying, too. Like mother, like son, apparently.)

To be fair, many other terrible things could've happened to the baby the Gang found in a dumpster behind Paddy's. But we're not handing them a trophy for quickly scheming to turn the kid into a model and (yikes) applying shoe polish to his face to make him appear Hispanic. Let's just be thankful the authorities arrived when they did.

Mac and Dennis' brief foray into the suburbs ended very badly for one poor pooch: Mac got a dog he named Dennis Jr., but was soon burying the dog in the backyard and blaming Dennis for neglecting it. Then at dinner, he told Dennis he switched up his usual mac-n-cheese recipe... so he added their dead dog to the mix? We can forgive doing horrible things to people, but when dogs are involved, sorry, you've lost us.

In the Gang's defense: There was a fire escape! And longtime rivals like the McPoyles and Gail the Snail did manage to flee before burning alive. But no thanks to the Paddy's Pub crew, of course. When the apartment caught fire, Dennis made sure to trap their enemies inside after the Gang had all gotten out safely. 'Twas a festive Thanksgiving, indeed.

When you leave Charlie to his own dumb devices, atrocities like this happen: To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, Charlie kidnapped a little person he insisted was a "leprechaun" before he and Mac took turns assaulting him, insisting that he reveal where his "pot of gold" is. There was a twist — the guy was actually a pickpocket who'd been stealing from Paddy's patrons for years — but yeah, that doesn't really excuse their enhanced interrogation tactics.

Frank has pulled some spiteful pranks over the years, but it's hard to top convincing Dee and Dennis to dig up their dead mother's grave by telling them she's actually alive and her coffin is filled with hidden cash. Well, it was filled with her rotting corpse, instead. Gotcha!

Oof... we would say this didn't age well, but it wasn't a great look at the time, either. Locked in a property dispute with the Israeli businessman who just moved in next door, Mac and Dennis decided to "go jihad" and cover their faces with turbans to shout vaguely Arabic gibberish in an intimidating video message. They followed that up by "accidentally" firebombing the guy's building... which set back the Middle East peace process a few more decades.

Plenty of innocent bystanders saw their lives get worse after crossing paths with the Gang, but this is next-level horrible: Inspired by Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the Gang tried to give immigrant family the Juarezes a new home, but they ended up kidnapping them, running up massive debt in their name, giving them an American "makeover" with wigs and colored contacts and ultimately demolishing their home down to rubble. (This one was so bad, the show even felt the need to dispense some instant justice and give Dee's inherited mansion to the Juarezes, just so we didn't walk away in disgust.)