Breaking Bad is Crossing Over With It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia?
An image of Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul hanging with the It's Always Sunny gang raises some questions.
It’s been almost a decade since Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, finished up the final season of Breaking Bad, the much-lauded story of a high school chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. All the characters came back together for some later episodes of the spin-off series Better Call Saul, but it seemed like that would be the last time we’d ever see all the characters in one place. Now, a tweet by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia actor and co-creator Rob McElhenney implies that the band of criminals might once again reunite — this time as part of McElhenney’s darkly humorous sitcom.
The tweet shows the two Breaking Bad actors joining the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia cast posing together in Paddy’s Pub– the fictional bar owned by the show’s main characters. While the tweet does not outright state that Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, or Saul Goodman will be appearing on the show, it does ask whether there could possibly be a better crossover. This raises the distinct possibility of the characters appearing on the long-running show.
The most recent season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia ended in December 2021, meaning it’s been almost a year and a half since we’ve seen what The Gang has been up to. When we last met the show’s cast of ne’er-do-wells, they were dragging the corpse of one of the characters’ father up an Irish mountain to drop him into the sea. After accidentally leaving the rotten corpse on the shore, the gang returned to America — where they apparently met up with the characters from Breaking Bad — or characters played by the same cast members, at least.
There’s no word from anyone else in the picture about why, exactly, the Breaking Bad stars visited the set of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. However, It’s unlikely that they were just stopping by a TV set for a friendly drink. A collaboration seems likely, though it’s not clear whether the FXX sitcom will actually feature the characters from the AMC show, or whether they’ll appear as different (though probably similar) characters that don’t directly infringe upon the original show’s copyrights.
It might usually seem out of place for hardened criminals from a dramatic crime thriller to appear in a sitcom, but it’s hard to argue that the characters in Breaking Bad wouldn’t seem right at home on the set of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “The Gang,” as the sitcom’s characters are called, is notorious for thinking up (and completely botching) insane ideas that could earn them money, including getting addicted to crack so that they can apply for welfare, breaking into someone’s house to do unauthorized remodeling, and kidnapping a newspaper critic to get him to recant his claim that Paddy’s Pub is the worst bar in Philadelphia. Teaming up with notorious members of the criminal underworld to make a quick buck would be par for the course.
We won’t know for sure why the Breaking Bad cast is on the set of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia until Season 16 begins. The first episode of Season 16 is set to air on June 7, 2023.
