It's Always Sunny Cut A More Nefarious Plot For The Nightman Cometh
Of all the great episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," one of the most ambitious and hilarious is "The Nightman Cometh," which follows the gang as they put on a rock opera created by the bar's janitor, Charlie (Charlie Day). The musical is inspired by Charlie's childhood and features a villain called the Nightman who comes into his room at night, likely based on Charlie's pedophile uncle, Jack (Andrew Friedman). In the end Charlie created the whole play as a means to convince the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) to marry him, which confirms the rest of the gang's assumptions that the play had to have a target or a "mark." It turns out that there was almost originally an entire secondary plot to "The Nightman Cometh" that would have made the aim of the play pretty different, but that having a "mark" was still very much a part of it.
"The Always Sunny Podcast" gives fans a deep dive behind their favorite episodes, and in the episode for "The Nightman Cometh," co-writers, producers, and stars Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton discussed the original plans for their first musical episode and how it changed as time went on. If they had kept to the original plan, the episode might not have become the masterpiece of musical hilarity that we all know and love, so things worked out in the end. Besides — it turns out they still used the idea, just in a different episode!
A musical as distraction for a prank war
In the original version of "The Nightman Cometh" that the writers were trying to put together, the gang were all in on the musical together, and it was a distraction so they could distract from a giant prank they were trying to pull on a rival bar. Howerton explained that the entire idea was that the musical would provide them with alibis, though they would still be engaging in the prank war:
"And they had pulled some kind of prank on us and we were gonna pull the ultimate prank by — but we needed them out of their bar, and in order to do that we created a musical, and that we were all in the musical because that would prove that, like, we couldn't have done what they're saying we did because we were all on stage, and then we were going to do a whole thing where, like, whenever someone was off stage, they'd be going over to the rival bar, so that was the ulterior motive, and we were sort of obsessed with this idea of, like, well, we can't just do a musical for no reason. Like, there's gotta be some other reason why we're doing it. So then we just decided, well, let's just write that in."
While this idea is pretty funny, it's also rather complicated, requiring a lot of cutting back and forth from the musical instead of just showing the performance in its entirety. The play is way too funny to be cut away from, so the right decision was made. But what about the bar rivalry? That sounds awfully familiar ...
Flipadelphia, baby!
Cormac Bluestone, who worked as a composer on the episode, joined the regulars on the podcast and he remembered that while on tour for the live performances of "The Nightman Cometh," they screened an episode for audiences: "The Gang Reignites the Rivalry." And as Bluestone points out, it's a whole lot like the story they cut from "The Nightman Cometh." In "The Gang Reignites the Rivalry," the gang decide to start back up a feud with a rival bar that they once faced in a flip cup tournament called Flipadelphia. Instead of making a musical to provide them with an alibi, they use Dee (Kaitlin Olson) as their fall guy, but otherwise the idea is the same.
The idea of the rival bar is a lot of fun and they have touched on it with "The Gang Solves the North Korea Situation" and "The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award," episodes where the gang goes up against numerous other bars in an attempt to make money or win awards, but "The Gang Reignites the Rivalry" is the closest to the original "Nightman" idea. As co-writer and producer Megan Ganz tells the guys: "No storyline gets wasted. They all get done eventually."