Charlie Day referred to it as a “Frankenstein episode,” due to how “we had to pull out so much of this episode to get it to the run time. And we pulled out just enough that it made sense.” Potential misreadings of “Frankenstein” aside, it’s easy to see what Day’s talking about: the episode is as funny as any season 4 outing, but it speeds through a lot of material in a really short period of time. Day compared it to the two-parter “Mac and Charlie Die,” which also started as an episode that veered way too far past a standard 22-minute runtime. “Nowadays there’s more wiggle room in television,” Day explained, “but back then … You pretty much have to hit this time window, because we have all these ads that are paying for the eyeballs.”
He and Glenn Howerton confirmed that they’d tried to turn “Dennis: An Erotic Memoir” into a two-parter as well, but FX gave them a hard no. “They never wanted two-parters,” Howerton said. “You know, they always wanted the show to play like you could watch any episode at any time and it wasn’t tied to anything else.”
The result was that while “Mac and Charlie Die” was expanded to fit an hour time slot, this episode was squeezed down into just thirty minutes. It led to a somewhat rushed, feverish episode, one that probably could’ve excelled in the modern streaming era where episodes often get to be as long as they want. On the bright side, at least the subsequent edits spared the life of imaginary Rob Thomas. He may have died a horrible death, but only in the DVDs. As far as regular viewers are concerned, Thomas lived to sing another day.