What started as a few friends with a pilot made from $200 eventually evolved into the cult phenomenon of Sunny, a disturbingly comedic show that forces viewers to laugh — and feel a bit guilty doing it. 

The show follows Dennis, Charlie, Mac, and Dee — a group of friends affectionately known as “the gang” — who run a bar in Philadelphia and find themselves involved in a variety of politically incorrect conversations that lead to rampant hijinks and schemes. Sunny has addressed everything from racism and abortion to pedophilia and retardation in its first 3 seasons, and continues to teeter on the edge of madness in the show’s current fourth season — which writer-producer-actor Glenn Howerton, who plays Dennis, promises will be a “pretty rapey season.” 

“We haven’t found anything yet that we wouldn’t touch on. I would say that we make reference to rape in about, and I’m not kidding, 60-70% of our episodes this year,” Howerton says. “But the implication of it is apparent in many of the episodes this year. It’s to the point we don’t even know we’re doing it.”

Rob McElhenney, who plays the hopelessly ignorant and wannabe-badass Mac; Charlie Day, who plays the illiterate and hygiene-lacking Charlie; and Howerton, who plays the self-absorbed Dennis with a penchant for popping off his shirt, each wear several hats as writers, producers, and actors on the show. The guys are involved in every aspect of the show, but Howerton admits that there are drawbacks to the situation. “If there’s a disadvantage, it’s that we won’t let other people get their say, which I think makes the show what it is,” he says. “But it does make you wonder if the show would be better if we would just shut the fuck up sometimes.” 

When Katilin Olson signed on to play Dee, Dennis’ insecure sister whose memories of a back brace in high school make her desperate to fit in, her character was intended to be merely the “voice of reason” instead of part of the gang. “I didn’t want that, and Rob promised me that they had every intention of developing the character and making her an equal part of this foursome,” Olson says. “It was kind of a leap of faith, and they all pulled through. I’ve been able to do more ridiculous stuff as the years go on.” 

In its first 3 raunchy seasons, they’ve addressed many of today’s cultural concerns such as gun control, homelessness, and pedophilia in the most twisted ways possible — in one episode, the gang is convinced they must take down all the bums in the city after watching one masturbate for what seems like forever in the first few minutes of the show. Howerton says they have never found themselves at a loss of things to write about. Many of the topics are sensitive, real-life subjects people are currently dealing with — but he says they never set out to make light of serious issues. “I like to think of it as a way these characters relate to what people are going through,” Howerton says. “It’s just seeing how these really misguided people deal with the same things everyone’s dealing with on a daily basis.”

The cast and crew of the show also like to keep it all in the family — Olson and McElhenney started dating a year into the show and recently married, and Day and Mary Elizabeth Ellis, who ironically plays Charlie’s unrequited love on the show, dated before the show and married during the second season. Olson says they have all been close friends since they started filming, and although she and McElhenney kept their relationship a secret for a while, she knew it was more than a fling. “We knew it was a terrible idea, and we were like ‘What are we doing?’” she says. “But I’m incredibly irresistible, so what was he supposed to do?”

FX has extended the show for 39 more episodes, guaranteeing at least another 2 seasons. And the fourth season promises more of the same deranged topical humor that fans have seen from the gang in the past — including follow-up appearances by fan favorites “Greenman” and “Nightman.” The cast also flashes back to 1776 in “The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell,” where Dee tries to kill Dennis after he makes her his slave, to which he threatens that she would then be passed on to Mac for “copious amounts of bottom sex.” 

“That would be one example of the rapey season,” Olson says. “It doesn’t happen. We just talk about it.”