The ‘Next’ Seinfeld Has Already Been on TV for a Decade

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There is perhaps no journey in the world of television more quixotic than the ceaseless quest to find the so-called “next” Seinfeld. Whether it’s one of the show’s anniversaries or a new series that appears poised to take up the mantle (RIP, Mulaney), there seems to be a never-ending string of catalysts to search for the successor to the ‘Show About Nothing,’ which makes its grand arrival on Hulu on Wednesday.

This search is foolish. It is foolish for a lot of empirical reasons—most notably that searching for the “next” whatever in any medium of art is an inherently pointless exercise—but it’s especially foolish because the show that best fits the ‘next’ Seinfeld mold just wrapped up its 10th hilariously depraved season in February and has been on the air since before Hulu even existed.

When It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia debuted on FX on Aug. 4, 2005, inheriting the mantle left behind by arguably the most acclaimed sitcom of all time would have been the furthest thing from the mind of creator Rob McElhenney. McElhenney, along with co-stars Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day, had secured Sunny’s series order at FX by shooting an episode on their own cameras for less than $200. The show’s first season featured just seven episodes, lacked any recognizable stars and scored ratings that could generously be described as middling. (Seinfeld also came from rather humble beginnings—it didn’t crack the Top 40 of the Nielsen ratings until its fourth season.) What Sunny had going in its favor was a scathing, confident sense of humor that couldn’t be found anywhere else on television.

Like the Seinfeld gang, the Sunny crew spends its days cooking up schemes and plots that have little hope of panning out. In a Season 9 episode of Seinfeld, the incorrigible George Costanza (Jason Alexander) thinks up a ruse to score himself a private, handicapped bathroom at his office. The episode ends with him being chased down the street in a motorized scooter by a group of cane-wielding octogenarians. When his battery craps out on him, George is forced to pick up his scooter and scurry away—only to run into his boss. In a Season 2 episode of Sunny, Dennis (Howerton) and Dee (Kaitlin Olson) decide to quit working at Paddy’s Pub and go on welfare instead. In a matter of days, they end up addicted to crack and have to grovel for their jobs back. Even though both Seinfeld and Sunny revel in their characters’ depravity, they always make sure that their reprobates get exactly what they deserve in the end.

In a way, it’s hard to believe that Sunny didn’t draw more Seinfeld comparisons in its early years, but perhaps that’s simply because there weren’t enough people watching Sunny to make those comparisons. And, frankly put, people didn’t analyze and discuss TV with the same rigor that they do today. If they had, they likely would have noticed that Sunny took Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no learning” formula, threw it into a blender along with a healthy portion of debauchery and reckless abandon, cranked that blender to “HIGHLY EXCESSIVE” and then consumed enough of the resulting concoction to transform into a sort of sitcom Abomination. It was beautiful.

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