It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia took a rare pause for genuine sentiment in its season 13 finale.
The episode, titled "Mac Finds his Pride", saw Rob McElhenney's character, Ronald "Mac" McDonald, who came out last year, come out to his father through an elaborately choreographed dance number.
The episode sees Frank (Danny Devito) attempt to convince Mac to play the role of the gang's token dancing gay guy for their bar's pride parade float. “I don’t know where I fit in as a gay man, and it’s starting to get to me,” Mac tells him. “I’m not feeling very proud.”
Frank responds by taking him first to an underground S&M club and a drag bar, before finally convincing Mac to come out to his father Luther (Gregory Scott Cummins), who is in prison. As it turns out, Mac's feelings are best expressed through dance, as he launches into a routine with a female dancer, played by ballerina Kylie Shea, posed as God.
"Yeah, that took months. I don't really know how to dance. I've never really been a dancer. And I still can't dance. I can just do that routine," McElhenney told E! News.
The actor said he was surprised at the response to Mac's coming out episode from last year. Although he believed they handled the moment "pretty well", he said: "at the end of the day, it was still an episode of comedy and I just assumed that people were laughing along with us."
"And through social media, I had a massive response of our fans in the LGBTQ community that reached out and told me how moved they were and how important it was to them that they felt represented on a show that they loved. And I just was not expecting that," he added. "I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And I just didn't think that we were that kind of show, and it turned out that we were for people."
"And so we wanted to honor that and do something that, you know, felt very different from what we normally do, that we would create an episode that seems like it's going in one direction and then pull the rug out from underneath."
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