It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the Fastest-Talking Show on TV – Here's the Proof
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is an unconventional TV show in a number of ways, from its brand of humor to the cast being intentionally unsympathetic.
But another thing which makes it stand out among more standard sitcoms is the fact that it is the wordiest show on TV, with 176.2 words per minute, as a study by WordFinderX has revealed.
WordFinderX was concerned with understandability of current TV shows.
Given that a lot of people nowadays watch TV shows with subtitles, and only a minority of those who do so have hearing problems, people at WordFinderX decided to check the words per minute count for subtitles of popular TV shows.
This is not an idle inquiry – subtitles are an accessibility tool, which might fail to deliver intended results when phrases change too rapidly.
The National Disability Authority recommends that "English language subtitles for a general audience should not usually exceed 170 words per minute and, if possible, be kept to a maximum 140 words".
The study found that comedy is the wordiest genre by far – not surprising, given that comedy, and particularly comedy on TV, is so heavily dialogue-based – with an average 133.6 wpm across the 15 wordiest comedies and a number of shows exceeding the recommended threshold of 140 wpm.
By comparison, there are no popular sci-fi/fantasy shows which clock more than 100 wpm. However, only two of the examined shows exceeded the maximum of 170 wpm: Brooklyn Nine-Nine and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
It is not difficult to guess, why Always Sunny ended up taking the dubious prize. Not only its characters talk a lot, and not only they talk fast.
As one Redditor noticed in an immensely upvoted comment on this piece of news: "It probably helps up the average when you constantly have between two to five people yelling lines over each other."
So, incredible wordiness of the show is yet another (in addition to its dialogue being very much NSFW) side effect of having a cast of narcissists, who are far too self-absorbed to take turns talking, like normal, polite people usually do.