It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has an "uncharacteristically wobbly start" to its record-breaking 15th season

The A.V. Club

The FXX comedy officially surpassed The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet as the longest-running live-action sitcom with its Season 15 premiere last night. But while it was great to see the Gang back together after a two-year hiatus, the season premiere "hardly feels like the gracefully filthy reentry into the It’s Always Sunny world fans might have been anticipating," says Dennis Perkins. "Instead, the Gang’s anthology of off-years shenanigans feels rushed and a little obvious, each story in the episode’s three-part structure leaning heavily into the events surrounding a single joke, and leaving precious little time for nuance. And, yes, I said 'nuance.' Sunny’s broadest comedy outrages are couched in character, and how the Gang’s uniformly yet uniquely awfulnesses coalesce into that episode’s plot. Here, we get frustratingly fleeting glimpses of just how a quintet of Philadelphia’s least responsible businesspeople spent their sketchily acquired COVID stimulus loans in three separate tales, all presided over by an understandably aghast government inspector." ALSO: Season 15 is starting to push these characters down paths we’ve been expecting for years.