Footage From The Unaired It's Always Sunny Pilot Found Its Way Into The Finished Show
The road to making most sitcoms doesn't usually involve home movies, but then again, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" isn't most sitcoms. The series is now the longest-running live-action comedy of all time with a whopping 16 seasons, but once upon a time, it was just the weird little dream of writers and stars Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton. They made a home movie pilot for $200, shooting with friends and a camcorder, and used that to shop the idea around to various networks. FX eventually picked them up and the rest is hilarious history. Some of the home movie pilot has been released online, with Jordan Reid as the original version of Sweet Dee and Morena Baccarin as Carmen, but it also exists in another way, as much of its script was recycled for the season 1 episode "Charlie Has Cancer." It turns out that there was a bit of footage they reused too, making the most of their season 1 budget.
On the episode of "The Always Sunny Podcast" called "The Waitress," where Mary Elizabeth Ellis (who plays the Waitress) joined the crew, they discussed the earliest incarnation of the show and mused on how they managed to put everything to good use.
Pilots, pilots, pilots!
On the podcast episode, Day, who plays the lovelorn Charlie, talks about his excitement that a scene from the pilot is in "Charlie Has Cancer." The rest of the gang gets a bit confused because there have been a couple of pilots, technically, and while Day tries to clarify ... it is still a bit confusing. Essentially, they shot the home movie pilot, which got FX sold on the idea enough to make a real pilot based on the home movie pilot, and then, according to Day, they used some of the footage from that second pilot for another episode:
"That was a coffee shop where we shot the original home movie pilot. Which, that scene I think not the home movie scene, but the, when we first got a budget from FX, that scene is in the episode. Where I have the red sweater and I'm watching you and it's from 'Charlie Has Cancer.' That's exciting."
"Charlie Has Cancer" ended up being the fifth episode aired, and the first episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is "The Gang Gets Racist." Not all of "Charlie Has Cancer" comes from the pilot that they shot for FX in 2004, but the coffee shop scene apparently does! The confusion doesn't really stop there, however, because there's also a coffee shop scene with Charlie in "The Gang Gets Racist!"
An awkward date at The Philadelphia Java Company
In "The Gang Gets Racist," Charlie takes his date (Telisha Shaw) to the coffee shop where the Waitress works because he wants to prove to her that he's not racist after he overheard her saying something, well, racist. The Waitress is not particularly impressed, just like she's not impressed when Charlie visits her in "Charlie Has Cancer" to fill her in on his diagnosis. The episodes work out of their original order because the characters haven't really fully been established yet, and really wouldn't until season 3 or so. In those early episodes, everyone is significantly less deranged and more competent as human beings, though they're all definitely still terrible people.
"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" had a strange path to getting on our screens, from camcorder pilot to FX pilot to the real first episode, but it's pretty neat that they were able to put some of the unaired FX pilot to good use.