This is not my beautiful house….
By Matt Fowler
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
Aside from not buying into the initial set-up, “Mac & Dennis Move to the Suburbs” was pretty damn great. Yeah, I don’t know where they got the idea of it being somehow cheaper to rent a very nice house than a s***hole apartment, but these two had to get out to Cul-De-Sac Land somehow. So I’m being needlessly nitpicky. Because as a city boy now living in the suburbs, a lot of this episode really hit home with the hilarity.
The horrible time suck, rage-inducing commute. The dead-on notion that weird machine/home noises in the midst of pin drop quiet are vastly worse than the blended calamity of a city. The chatty neighbors you want nothing to do with. The resentment you feel driving to work coupled with the isolation you feel cooped up at home. Some of it’s cliche, but also accurate. And throwing the likes of Mac and Dennis into this hell really worked well. Especially given Always Sunny’s penchant for instant irony. Like Dennis assuming his drive will be relaxing and then immediately cutting to him going psychotic on the freeway and calling everyone a “fat pig.” Or the two of them assuming they’ll get a great night sleep and then…well, you understand.
Only Frank had to foresight here to know that these two couldn’t hack it in the ‘burbs. And so the wager was set. One month in Sleepyville hell and Frank would pay their rent for a year. Of course, they only realized right at the end that, even if it was free, they’d never in a million years consider living there that long. So, long story short, Dennis, Mac, AND DEE, wound up having to share a king-sized bed with a black old man.
In the midst of all this, Mac and Dennis adopted a married couple dynamic. Mac the bored, discontent homebody and Dennis the bitter, angry provider. The episode also started to lean into some horror elements toward the end. The scary movie piano score. Dennis slowly snapping and finding himself in a full-blown Jack Torrance rage. I was a little bummed that his front lawn scene with “Sure Is A Hot One Today” Wally was a dream sequence. Sure, it showed us that Dennis was losing it and imagining people, but it would have played a bit funnier if, in the story, he’d really lost it that hard. Granted, everything would have pretty much plateaued there. I get that. Still, Always Sunny is a show that works best when it goes for broke and doesn’t hold back and tease us with daydreams.
Things did get laugh-out-loud nuts by the end though. Mac let Dennis Jr. starve to death, and then cooked him into Mac’s Famous Mac & Cheese. And Dennis himself was about to murder someone with a fire poker. I will say though – that one holding shot of the pool guy, Jimmy, sitting in the living room and overhearing Mac and Dennis loudly argue about having him over for dinner was one of the best moments here.
“Mac & Dennis Move to the Suburbs” was able to mine gold from a very simple idea. Take these two crazy, irrational city people and place them in quaint suburbia. It stands mostly as a testament to the show’s characters that we still just love watching them react to new situations.
