Celebrity Booze: The Ultimate Cash Grab
To have celebrity cameos or to not have celebrity cameos...
My coverage of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 16 continues with episode 5.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia managed to get celebrities on board back when the show still had more of the filmic sheen of a home video. Fischer Stevens, Roddy Piper, Jason Sudeikis, Alexandra Daddario, David Huddleston, Guillermo del Toro, P. Diddy (possibly their biggest-name grab before they got really big), to name a few. They’ve maintained keeping all ensuing name appearances on the tasteful side even in their later years, and on the whole Sunny is pretty good about picking actors that are foldable into their world. Dax Shepard as one of Mac’s fellow cult members in “Ass Kickers United: Mac and Charlie Join a Cult;” Keegan-Michael Key as the Steve Harvey surrogate in “The Gang Goes on Family Fight;” Colm Meaney as Charlie’s long-lost Irish father in “The Gang’s Still in Ireland.” I would say it’s more often that Sunny has a Rob Thomas and Sinbad in “Dennis Reynolds: An Erotic Life” situation than a Mindy Kaling in “The Gang Makes Paddy’s Great Again” situation (which I contend is one of their worst episodes on top of their worst celebrity cameo ever).
So, we arrive at “Celebrity Booze: The Ultimate Cash Grab,” the first Sunny episode (I believe? Let me know if I’m wrong!) to include celebrity actors who are not playing Sunny-world side characters but playing variations of themselves (Rob Thomas and Sinbad do not count). Does it work? I think so, maybe, although there is something that I don’t really like about seeing Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston in an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s a little weird, a little too “high-class”—a little too “premium,” as the guys might say if you saw the episode, and maybe that’s part of the point. Still, it teeters between working well and feeling like featuring big names just because they have the clout and connections now to do so (Mindy Kaling). I think perhaps the episode would have been better with just Bryan Cranston, a formidable comedy actor who’s performance here reminds one just how badly we need to see him doing something funny again (which we at least have a chance to see until 2026, after which he will be taking an “acting pause”).
However, the plot isn’t a huge stretch to warrant the duo’s inclusion, and produces some solid gags and running bits. The Breaking Bad actors are launching their fictional alcohol brand “Dos Hombres” with a meet-and-greet in Philadelphia to promote it. So, Mac, Charlie, and Dennis, believing it to be easy to sell something so long as you have a celebrity face attached, devise a scheme to pitch the two actors their own alcohol line at the meet-and-greet. The brainstorming scene in this episode is great, finding the guys all on the same page about what they believe to be the first-classiest and second-classiest alcohol brands ever invented: Goldschläger and Jägermeister, respectively. The reasoning here is that European-sounding names make regular people feel high-end, so Dennis’s plan is a blend of all these drinks to create: SchlägerSchnappstermeister. Beautiful.
Of course, the guys want to get Frank in on the scheme to invest — which he does. They call him up while he’s circling a private jet around Philadelphia, which he’s doing to put enough miles on it so that it seems like he went to Aruba: “a tax thing,” he tells Dee, who “glommed on” under the guise of joining the fake trip and is now stuck on the plane going circles around the very city they both live in. While Frank and Dee are trapped in the skies, that night, Dennis, Charlie, and Mac arrive at the meet-and-greet, with Mac looking like George Michael (Michael Jordan is actually the intended vibe) and Charlie looking like a limo driver. The latter ultimately cannot enter the venue, due to his stomach being full of metal nickels from his homemade “Nickelschläger” that he failed to pitch Mac and Dennis on. So, he’s forced out back to throw them all up.
Mac and Dennis fail to ensnare Cranston and Paul, who are put off by the schmucks attempting a professional handshake which Cranston is keen to indulge but Paul (playing the alpha in the episode) is not — after Cranston compliments Mac’s suit, Mac says “I’m not allowed to talk” (as instructed by Dennis), to which Cranston replies, gravely, “I’m not supposed to, either.” The guys are shuffled out and forced to reconsider the plan, which takes an optimistic turn when Charlie is mistaken for Paul and Cranston’s limo driver. At the whims of their fake driver, the actors are shepherded onto Frank’s plane, where poor Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston are suddenly at the behest of the entire gang attempting to pitch them their horrible ideas: Nickelschläger, SchlägerSchnappstermeister, and Mac’s hastily-devised “fashion and lifestyle brand.”
I should clarify—there are not two celebrity cameos in this episode, but three. In a move that should surprise no one, Sunny finally got a cameo from Philly’s own Gritty, the much-memed mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team. It was an expected appearance, and funny to consider after they could not legally include or talk about the Philly Phanatic in “The World Series Defense”. But it’s pretty pointless in a scene that amounts to nothing more than “Look, we got Gritty, guys!” and long after Gritty’s social media popularity has already dwindled.
It’s the worst part of an episode that’s otherwise in the upper-middle range, quality-wise. I’d probably rank it below the season’s first two episodes but above “The Gang Gets Cursed.” There are some good moments but, especially in comparison to the gangbusters “Frank vs. Russia,” nothing terribly stand-out—that is, aside from the running joke of apparently no one, not even the backstage worker who mistakenly enlists Charlie as a limo driver, knowing Breaking Bad before Malcolm in the Middle. Paul and Cranston are consistently referred to as “father and son,” “Malcolm and his dad,” and “The Malcolm and the Middle guys,” with Charlie calling Paul “Mr. Malcolm.” This is already funny, but leads to the funniest line of the episode. After Mac and Dennis are dismissed by Paul and Cranston at the meet-and-greet, Dennis, acknowledging Aaron Paul’s apparent alphadom over Cranston, says “Malcolm’s not in the middle—he’s on top.”
The whole fictional alpha-beta dynamic of Paul and Cranston is mostly funny, though Paul is a surprisingly insufferable presence compared to Cranston—far overplaying his fake caricature of himself and absolutely out of place in the Sunny universe. Cranston’s comparatively subordinate persona works well—of course predictable if one remembers his performance as hapless Hal on Malcolm in the Middle—and it’s especially great in the fraught limo ride. Enjoying the “grit” of being driven by a man who previously threw up in the car, Cranston starts waxing poetic about “the great white way of Broadway” that he never actually got on stage for, and how he is a “servant to the gods of chance” when Paul bitterly brings up Cranston’s gambling problem. This all culminates on the plane, when Cranston delivers an equal parts epic and amusing monologue denouncing Paul’s hold on him only to reveal it as a showcase of his acting prowess. The Gang tells him he should really consider doing drama, before Paul and Cranston make the all-too-familiar request for the Gang to get away from them.
Overall, “Celebrity Booze: The Ultimate Cash Grab” does a fairly solid job of showcasing Sunny’s name-getting abilities while balancing the “back-to-basics” structure the show is seizing this season, even if the cameos themselves can’t help but overwhelm the episode a bit detrimentally. I also do feel, as I briefly mentioned earlier, that there is at least a clear level of self-awareness to the episode, present in the nature of the cameos and in the title: “The Ultimate Cash Grab.” The Sunny guys may have fame and fortune now, but they’re good writers and they aren’t stupid. Like pop icon Conner4Real, perhaps they just keep a guy around to punch them in the nuts to remind them where they came from.
Additional thoughts/favorite moments
Mac’s “Michael Jordan” outfit is very, very funny, and manages to make him look very silly especially with that little earring. I will continue to harangue about this but I do not care for the way Rob looks now, so any chance to make his crazy jacked physique look funny and at-home with the rest of the Sunny atmosphere is welcome.
Also, deepest apologies to Rob, who I mistakenly thought had actually pierced his ear for promo of the star-studded episode, and did not realize it was a part of his costume.
On the plane, Dee wants something to eat and finds “canned oysters” in the mini fridge. Later on, she learns that those oysters were an old celebrity marketing scheme that Frank had tried in association with Tony Danza—"Tony’s Oyster’s in a Canza.”
The scene where the guys call Frank to get some of his money, as they always do, and as soon as Dee interjects they hit her with increasingly shrill cries for her to “Shut up”—Dennis ultimately promises that he will “sew her mouth shut.”