On the podcast episode, Day, who plays the lovelorn Charlie, talks about his excitement that a scene from the pilot is in “Charlie Has Cancer.” The rest of the gang gets a bit confused because there have been a couple of pilots, technically, and while Day tries to clarify … it is still a bit confusing. Essentially, they shot the home movie pilot, which got FX sold on the idea enough to make a real pilot based on the home movie pilot, and then, according to Day, they used some of the footage from that second pilot for another episode:
“That was a coffee shop where we shot the original home movie pilot. Which, that scene I think not the home movie scene, but the, when we first got a budget from FX, that scene is in the episode. Where I have the red sweater and I’m watching you and it’s from ‘Charlie Has Cancer.’ That’s exciting.”
“Charlie Has Cancer” ended up being the fifth episode aired, and the first episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is “The Gang Gets Racist.” Not all of “Charlie Has Cancer” comes from the pilot that they shot for FX in 2004, but the coffee shop scene apparently does! The confusion doesn’t really stop there, however, because there’s also a coffee shop scene with Charlie in “The Gang Gets Racist!”