Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the FX(X) original comedy , entering its seventeenth season. This first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews—including Dennis’ take on the second episode that aired tonight, which will post tomorrow—will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To see what else we’re covering this summer, check out our full schedule.

“We’re just doing the one thing… you guys are all over the place.”

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s record-extending 17th season started early, with the Gang joining in for one of the most tonally improbable crossovers in TV history back in January. The Abbott Elementary side of that story was pretty great, the Gang’s invasion of a mostly Black Philly elementary school beaten back by Abbott’s fundamentally decent educators with only minimal casualties to life or property.

Okay, property did take more of a hit than we’d been led to believe, as tonight’s season premiere picks up with the Always Sunny side of things. Mac starts a small gym fire while trying to prove some 9/11 truther nonsense (with a jury-rigged flamethrower). And it’s ultimately revealed that Frank—when not bedeviling Gregory’s vegetable garden with battery acid and urine-soaked pelts—used the Gang’s distracting shenanigans to rip out Abbott’s aging copper piping for resale. All in all, the introduction of Dennis, Frank, Charlie, Dee, and Mac into a school full of children could have gone much, much worse. (Even the pipes were due to get replaced, leaving principal Ava to muse that at least her dodgy volunteers accidentally managed to help after all just like Frank insisted.)

Stylistically, “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” retains that show’s documentary style, since the Sunny episode is presented by Janelle James’ perpetually scheming Ava as leftover behind-the-scenes footage. Of course Ava would be the one who immediately has the Gang’s number. Introducing each ridiculous beat of tonight’s story from her office monitoring station, Ava greets each caught-on-camera scam with grudging recognition. Reaping the unaccustomed and much needed free labor from five townies working off their community service (they dumped a lot of stuff into the river, including a Cybertruck), Ava is happy to let things play out, even if she has to shake her head at how dumb the Gang is. (“I can’t believe these shitheads forgot they were mic-ed,” she confides to the camera after the Gang’s closed-door plotting is picked up by the crew.)

As for those schemes and scams, the episode picks right back up by illuminating each member of the Gang and their inner drives. Dennis dips immediately, ominously stating that he knows far too much “about cameras and consent” to let the crew have unfiltered access. Frank is his grub-goblin self, alternately scarfing down tasty garden compost and eyeing this run-down school for unlikely moneymaking opportunities. Dee imagines the unexpected reality show element of the Gang’s visit as yet another big break in her delusional journey to some sort of superstardom. Mac submits to the imposing Ava without question, his quest to get the Gang’s community service document signed away turning him into the principal’s obedient manservant.

As for Charlie, Abbott’s nurturing environment proves yet another glimpse into just how close Charlie Kelly is to redemption, given the right circumstances. (Even if Charlie Day says that Charlie’s newfound ability to read is only temporary.) In the Abbott Elementary half of the story, we saw how Charlie’s obvious illiteracy was greeted with empathy and understanding by Sheryl Lee Ralph’s no-nonsense Barbara. Here, he gets down to some Charlie work repairing teacher Jacob’s ducts before getting sucked into the ongoing Gang activity. There’s Mac and Frank’s plan to steal Abbott’s tallest (Black) student to help their all-white Philly alma mater’s struggling hoops team, and then Dennis’ to plumb the student body for likely boy band material.

Both plans crash and burn, inevitably, with both the bathroom come-on to the baffled would-be basketball savior (“Rodney can’t shoot for shit,” Ava tells the camera happily) and the music room auditions edging only marginally into suggestive predatory territory. “Oh thank God,” the relieved Jacob blurts when being reassured that the three grown men sizing up a teenage boy in a school restroom were only appraising the lad’s body for sports poaching reasons.

And therein lies the one element of this team-up that was always going to favor Abbott over Sunny. The Gang can’t be truly, terribly themselves. Sure, Frank openly pisses in a locker and Dee enlists some second graders in her plan to lure Gregory away from fellow Pitt grad Janine (partly but not entirely for the camera time), but it’s truly the teachers who get to cut loose from their formula more than the Gang can. Warning Gregory that she’s about to call the conniving Dee a bad word, Janine yet shocks her fella by calling Dee “a total fucking cunt.” (She then straight-up punches a locker hard enough to leave a crumped dent.) As Abbott Elementary reviewer LaToya Ferguson put it in assessing the uneasy mix of two morally opposite series back in January, “there’s also seemingly no way to ramp up the character here without veering into territory Abbott Elementary is not equipped to veer into.”

LaToya’s talking about Frank, but the point extends to all of the Gang, and Sunny. If the Gang went truly all-out reprehensible as they do when not surrounded by innocent kids and watchful adults (some with cameras), the collision would become an explosion. The Gang have done some truly horrific things to and around kids in their own South Philly warren. (LaToya rightly brings up “Frank Reynolds’ Little Beauties” as just one example.) But while this episode purports to show the Abbott episode from the It’s Always Sunny point of view, it’s still set in Abbott’s world, and the Gang just aren’t as bulletproof here.

Lisa Ann Walter’s rough-hewn Philly broad Melissa (“Go birds,” she and the Gang greet each other) might have been to the “skeevy” Paddy’s once upon a time, but as Spock once said about the Enterprise’s evil mirror world counterparts, it’s a lot easier for civilized people to pretend to be savages than the other way around. Ava may have started out (and largely remained) the single Abbott Elementary character who could move between these two shows without damage to her characterization, but as her Abbott arc has shown, on that show even the “monsters” can learn and change.

Not that the Gang are able to hide their true selves completely. Kaitlin Olson’s tirade to the camera after being thwarted in her plan to “steal” the completely repelled Gregory is a prime Sweet Dee meltdown. Roaring that she’d “rip this whole school bald” if the “liberal media” wouldn’t portray it as a hate crime, Dee majestically demonstrates the roiling poison sea just waiting to pour forth at the first ego-puncturing setback. Similarly, the Gang’s lunchroom debate about the students not truly understanding 9/11 escalates from “kids today” tut-tutting to a five-headed, spittle-flinging rage-storm of self-contradictory internet nuttery. Getting from the twin towers to “Arabs stealing golf” to “inside job” conspiracies to frogs controlling the weather to Charlie screeching how Bin Laden “died like the dog in the dirt that he was” goes right up there on the It’s Always Sunny satirically hilarious wall of fame/shame. As the observing Ava puts it succinctly after the Gang’s hair-trigger jumble of ignorant bombast: “They’re passionate but dumb as shit.”

A couple of the side-plots don’t pay off as well. Dennis’ obsession with pulling a Walter White with lab equipment to become the school’s happy purveyor of expertly distilled coffee is pretty benign for him. (His quick escape from the cameras on the Abbott episode certainly suggested more suitably unnerving possibilities.) And Dennis and Charlie’s boy band auditions might raise some red flags (“We’re kind of like shopping for kids,” explains Charlie to the rightfully wary Gregory), but their subsequent segue into creating a faculty revamp of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is similarly a dead end. It does allow Dennis to hilariously lose it behind another closed door (he is still mic-ed) upon hearing about Fall Out Boy. (I did like the further pairing of Charlie and Barbara, whose harmonizing reminds us once more of his potential for betterment.)

As a season premiere, “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” was a natural choice, but perhaps not the best one. The high-profile team-up certainly raised both shows’ profiles, and Quinta Brunson and her team obviously relished the opportunity to walk on the wrong, filthy, decidedly unwholesome side of Philly’s tracks. But Abbott’s episode was mid-season, and as a premiere, Sunny’s half of the story serves to neuter the Gang rather than allowing them to storm into Season 17 like the all-devouring, five-mawed creature they collectively are.