Even Rob McElhenney says the Glasgow Willy Wonka disaster feels like something out of a Philly sitcom

Rob McElhenney has weighed in on the viral Glasgow-based Willy Wonka immersive experience that ended up being a low-budget disaster heavily leaning on AI.

The Philly-born actor said it felt like a plot out of a hypothetical It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Abbott Elementary crossover episode. And fans agreed.

It all started when families attended a Willy Wonka-inspired “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in Glasgow, Scotland, over the weekend. For about $45 per ticket, visitors were promised an immersive experience with “extraordinary props, oversize lollipops, and a paradise of sweet treats,” on the event’s website.

Instead, ticket holders stumbled into a laughably sparse warehouse, actors in cheap costumes, several “creative liberties” (generously speaking), and no chocolate. It was so rough, attendees called the cops, saying they felt scammed. The experience was ultimately canceled.

After news of the event spread on social media, people from all over the world have become invested, digging into the promotional material and reading interviews with the paid actors.

Content creators have pointed out just how heavily event organizers appeared to rely on AI when it came to promotion, using fliers riddled with typos and mocking up fantastical sceneries that would be near-impossible to replicate in real life without professional set designers and a large budget (two things the event clearly lacked).

We also got a new meme out of it.

At the Wonka experience, a photo of Kirsty Paterson — a well-meaning gig actor who took the $315-per-day job as an Oompa Loompa — began circulating across social media.

“It went completely global,” Paterson told Vulture in an interview Wednesday. She revealed in the interview that the moment that photo was snapped was when the employees were told to abandon their scripts because the “jelly bean room” ran out of jelly beans to ration to the kids. “It was just humiliating,” she added.

Now able to laugh about it, Paterson — and attendees — have emphasized that she joined the crew for the right reasons and did her best to be a good sport over the circumstances. But things got derailed.

Following McElhenney’s comment that this whole fiasco is sitcom gold, fans have started suggesting which sitcom characters would be responsible for which Wonka experience plot points.

“Charlie singing ‘Pure Imagination’ and Franka-Loompa would have me in tears,” one user said on X (formerly Twitter). “Sunny organised [sic] this and Abbott visits,” said another.

Another contributor reasoned that Charlie, Kelly, and Frank of It’s Always Sunny were responsible for the AI-generated graphic for the event flier, which was full of gibberish and fake words. “That’s why there’s no spell check.”

As one user mused, “this episode writes itself.”