Modern Family's series finale will be accompanied by a retrospective special

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https://ew.com/tv/modern-family-docu...series-finale/

A Modern Farewell will air before the two-part one-hour finale on April 8.

[Heenan Fan]

The episode that aired on 4/1/20 was probably the worst one ever. I didn't laugh once. It's seems they're limping to the finish.

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Modern Family will go down as a show that stayed the same as TV changed, an artifact that straddles two starkly different versions of America

"When it premiered in 2009, Modern Family was progressive and clever," Matthew Jacobs says of the ABC comedy that concludes tonight after 11 seasons. "Family sitcoms, once TV comedy’s primary sustenance, had been replaced by shows about friend groups and the workplace, yet here came one that conferred purpose via the adjective in its title. The Los Angeles clan was large, blended, fairly wealthy and ostensibly diverse, from the macho patriarch (Ed O’Neill) adapting to the ways of his younger Latina wife (Sofia Vergara) and erudite stepson (Rico Rodriguez) to the well-adjusted gay couple (Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson) who’d adopted a stoic Vietnamese daughter. As the 2010s dawned, Modern Family became the rare series to generate colossal ratings and critical applause....By some standards, a show like this — one that got flagship treatment from ABC — goaded Heartland viewers into imagining domesticity with a less-orthodox makeup. In no time, it found fans across political party lines, namely the Obamas and the Romneys. The Pritchett-Dunphy tribe were pretty good surrogates for a country on the cusp of a major cultural upgrade. Today, however, Modern Family will go out as an artifact that straddles two starkly different versions of America. In September 2009, Barack Obama was eight months into his first term as president. Marriage equality would be legalized in 2015, and almost every sector of public life would start to reckon with its treatment of women and minorities. But nothing gold can stay, especially not when something stays for more than a decade. As technological disruption and Donald Trump’s ascendancy changed the national ethos, Modern Family couldn’t keep up."

ALSO:

• Co-creator Christopher Lloyd says Modern Family offered heart at a time when comedy was tilting heavily toward the cynical: "It spoils nothing to reveal that in the Modern Family finale, there is a group hug so spectacularly COVID-unsafe that one 6-foot space is occupied by 16 different people," he writes in The Hollywood Reporter. "If Seinfeld was a show about nothing (Was it? Did any comedy ever have more plot?), Modern Family was always, unabashedly, about emotion. OK, why mince words in a postapocalyptic world: It was about love. Certainly we always aimed for the high physical comedy moments: Phil, wearing a dog’s shock collar, reaching the edges of the yard … Claire smiling lugubriously at the topic of death … Gloria shooting a raft out from under Manny … Cam, in a Stanley Kowalski white T-shirt, yelling for a lost Stella, the dog."
• Eric Stonestreet posts a selfie from the day of his final audition for Modern Family in 2009: "I’ve posted this picture before, but it’s important to me and it’s an important moment in my life," he writes. "I took it right before I walked out the door to go to my final test for Modern Family 11 years ago. I had been an actor for 12 years before this moment. I wish I remembered why exactly I decided to take it, but my best guess is because I knew my life could forever change once I stepped out my front door that day. I’ve looked at it 1000 times. And what I see in it is: hope, fear, and determination."
• How did Modern Family, a show from Fox's studio, end up on ABC and not Fox?
• ABC reportedly charged between $400,000 and $750,000 for a 30-second ad during tonight's finale
• Ty Burrell says filming the series finale "was like a beautiful torture. It was like being at a wedding and a funeral at the same time"
• See all the Modern Family cast photos from 2009 through 2020
• Modern Family kids then vs. now: See how the Dunphy-Delgado-Tucker-Pritchett children have grown into young adults
• Check out emotional behind-the-scenes photos from the series finale

Modern Family ends its 11-season run having never really lost its magic

"You’re heartless!," says Hank Stuever, if your immediate reaction to the ABC comedy's sentimental and hug-filled series finale is to roll your eyes and wonder aloud why the show was still on. "Modern Family was still on in its 11th season because it was still very much itself: an Emmy-laden family comedy, created by Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, that was reliably filled with lightning-wit dialogue, hilarious misunderstandings and spot-on displays of physical comedy," says Stuever. "To the very end, it had a relatable style of humor that could be both sincere and barbed. It also featured a cast that consistently achieved a level of chemistry that most TV shows never come close to having. In a world gone soft while praising so much mediocrity, I found it interesting when viewers went out of their way to complain that Modern Family had lost its magic. It never really did. What it did lose — what even the best TV shows eventually lose — is the excited buzz that swirls around a breakout hit in its early days, when we’re all just so glad to have finally found a great show. For hipsters, the series finale event this week wasn’t Modern Family; it was the last episode of Schitt’s Creek, Pop TV’s louche underdog comedy that eventually found a loyal audience on Netflix. For the rest of America, still tuning in to network prime time by the millions, saying so long to Modern Family was a more wistful and prolonged process. Indeed, it was something ABC probably should have done two or three years ago."

ALSO:

• Modern Family's greatest flaw was also its greatest strength: "Modern Family might not have been the brilliant, progressive stand it’s often marketed as," says Kyle Fowle, "but there is something to be said for the way it normalized the type of family you didn’t typically see on TV. The show tackled social issues here and there in its early days, and did so under the rather strict format of the sitcom; remember when every episode used to end with a saccharine monologue and that acoustic guitar soundtracking the outro? But its greatest flaw was also its greatest strength: it was incredibly funny, and therefore didn’t need to be political, though perhaps it should have been more political, but also isn’t there something mildly radical about just being the show it was? Like I said above, it’s difficult to unpack the legacy in retrospect. It’s difficult because these things move in increments, something that Apple TV’s Visible: Out On Television recently did a great job of underlining. True change in the media landscape takes time for a number of reasons, some more sinister than others, and as much as I always wanted more out of Modern Family, there’s no denying that its mere presence and its massive popularity as measured by ratings and awards had a net positive impact. And again, those first five seasons or so are genuinely hilarious. If anything, it’s the beautiful march of progress that came to swallow up Modern Family."
• By virtue of its name, Modern Family was always going to have an expiration date: "Celebrated as it was at its launch and for much of its early run, the shine rusted as darker, cynical, raunchier, and more explicit comedies pulled focus on cable," says Kevin Fallon. "House of Cards, the first original series on Netflix, began airing in the winter of 2013. Nothing about the industry would be the same after that, and that disruption happened at a startling speed. The Netflix-led streaming service boom started midway through Modern Family’s fifth season, exactly halfway through its run on broadcast network ABC, which was seeing viewership, like all of broadcast, plummet. The revolutionary show was suddenly the stalwart benchmark, the conservative Old Faithful against which these zippy, exciting new ventures measured their hipness against. But it’s the culture that shifted, too. What was 'modern' then aged to something dated. A progressive sitcom became rote and basic. Wholesome soured to lame. A show that was once the epitome of cool became the sitcom equivalent of a 'Live, Laugh, Love' sign."
• Modern Family's finale felt like a warm hug: "The genius of Modern Family is that it ended as it began: with the families growing and changing, while maintaining their close bonds and sense of humor," says Diane Gordon. "The show that felt like a warm hug each week closed out their run with a well-crafted episode that didn't feel like a permanent goodbye, but instead like a 'see ya later.' One can't help but think about where these families will be in five years. Let's hope we'll get to find out - it's sad to think this is the last time we'll see these lovable characters."
• For LGBTQ parents, Mitch and Cam's portrayal was groundbreaking yet burdensome: "Modern Family was a cultural counterpunch," says Steve Majors. "It helped undermine negative stereotypes about gay and lesbian parents and set the stage for the following decade and increasingly positive representations of our families on everything from soup ads to sitcoms...But a rainbow-washed depiction of our families as well-adjusted also did us a disservice. They created expectations that no family, gay or straight, could ever live up to. Gay parents felt a subtle pressure to always put a positive face on our parenting, especially in public."
• Co-creator Christopher Lloyd explains the series finale: "The idea of having people moving on to new paths, we probably started to like that maybe two-thirds of the way through the season," he says. "While that would be bittersweet because we'd be kind of breaking up with a family unit — a unit that America has enjoyed seeing together and the characters have enjoyed being a part of — it seemed like the right thing to do. I mean, it's always been by my principle on this that a good ending actually needs to be a good beginning."
• A Modern Family spinoff would need a "solid idea" because of the "unfair burden" it would have: "There has been a little bit of talk among a couple of our writers that maybe there is an idea in there for something, but nothing solid has happened on that," says co-creator Steven Levitan. Fellow co-creator Christopher Lloyd adds: "It's tempting to think about what a spinoff might be. We have had conversations about it and we'll see if that comes to pass. It would need to be right; whatever a new show might be would be fighting a very heavy and probably unfair burden, which is a comparison to Modern Family. We don't want to do a series just because we want to keep the thing going or because we miss it. It would need to be a solid idea in its own right and that may happen, it may not. But it will get discussed. But it's a tall order."
• Modern Family creators feel they left everything on table: "Look, no one foresaw this, and altogether it was the right decision to end after 11 years which is 250 episodes," says Lloyd. "That’s a long run in any era, a particularly long run in the era we’re living in now where a Netflix show that runs 40 episodes is considered a marathon. So I don’t think we will look back on it as a bad decision." Levitan adds: "I don’t feel like I left anything on the table. I personally don’t go like, oh, if only we had another season we could get into this or that. I feel like we made a really nice show that entertained a lot of people, that brought some joy and laughter into people’s lives, and it was time to go."
• Modern Family's final days were expectedly teary and nostalgia-inducing: “It was like a really long funeral,” says Jesse Tyler Ferguson. “It also felt like a graduation at the same time. There was a lot of emotion.” Julie Bowen adds: “It was a little bit of a carnival atmosphere that at times made it difficult to actually get the job done. But at the same time, we had to be aware that this wasn’t just the actors’ show; this was everybody from props and casting to accounting to transpo. … Everybody wanted to be there as much as they could that last week.”
• ABC initially wanted nothing to do with Ty Burrell: Executives didn't find him "appealing, charming or funny," revealed the Modern Family farewell documentary
• Sarah Hyland recalls the bonds she made with her female co-stars: "The show is a male-dominant cast, really, so the female relationships have meant so much to me," she says. "It’s been amazing to have Julie Bowen and Sofia Vergara to look up to as role models because they're so funny, smart, talented, and kind. It's also been amazing to see Ariel Winter turn into a beautiful, strong, opinionated, smart woman as well. Aubrey Anderson-Emmons too."
• Julie Bowen posts an image of the cast and crew together on Zoom during the series finale: "Thank you to my fake family. I love you," she captioned her Instagram image.
• Watch the Modern Family cast virtually reunite on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
• Jimmy Kimmel is "revealed" to be the Modern Family docuementarian

Why Modern Family didn't follow The Office and reveal its documentary crew

“Look, it’s a valid idea," co-creator Christopher Lloyd tells EW of breaking the fourth wall. "Obviously, we started out in our pilot having that person be a character. And then the more we thought about, we thought, 'That might take the audience out of it.' And then having lived in a mockumentary form without literally a crew for 250 episodes, it felt like it might’ve been to meta or too cute to maybe do that for us. The Office made you aware that they were actual people much more than we did. We were just using it as a technique more than a sort of an actual reality.”

ALSO:

• 7.4 million watched Modern Family's series finale, a three-year high for the ABC comedy
• Modern Family finale struggled to unite its warm-hearted story about the unbreakable bonds of family with the unwieldy reality of different people who want different things

Modern Family deserves credit for its well-executed farce and paving the way for so many great ABC family comedies

"The reason TV isn't deluged with farce is that farce is crazily difficult — and the sort of internally arced episodic farce that Modern Family excelled at, where the details scattered throughout each 20 minutes would magically coalesce in something raucous or resonant in the last two minutes, isn't a thing to take for granted," says Daniel Fienberg. "He adds that Modern Family helped ABC achieve something that other networks couldn't when it comes to family comedies. "Modern Family was never going to actually be able to capture every modern family experience, and this is where I see its greatest impact and influence," says Fienberg. "It set a foundation on ABC that allowed at least a dozen other family comedies to thrive, albeit never quite at the same level of popularity. Other networks, even those with strong comedy brands, have struggled to develop one or two solid family comedies in the wake of the Modern Family premiere, but ABC has churned out one after another after another, and even if Modern Family wasn't a snapshot of the diverse experiences of the 21st century American family, ABC became that snapshot. Without Modern Family, there's no Black-ish and no Fresh Off the Boat and no Goldbergs and no Speechless. There's no Roseanne reboot (and The Conners) or Last Man Standing or Dr. Ken or Cristela or The Kids Are Alright or American Housewife. Hey, they weren't all critical winners and they weren't all audience favorites, but that's a lot of cultural experience that was represented onscreen in the wake of Modern Family that had either been ignored entirely or marginalized in past decades of programing. Modern Family was a cornerstone for something special, and as the landscape becomes more and more fragmented, I don't know if we'll ever see another moment when a single network is able to program between five and 10 above-average family comedies at once."

Modern Family forever changed how gay families are portrayed on TV

When the ABC comedy debuted in 2009, there were only 18 series regular LGBTQ cast members. That number is now up to 90. Cam and Mitch's wedding in 2014 drew 10 million viewers and arrived one year ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015. "Progress can’t be attributed to any one show by itself, but Modern Family hit the air at the moment it was most needed and became part of the culture change wave that lead to some of the real-world wins we’ve seen,” said GLAAD’s Megan Townsend. “The series has consistently brought in millions of viewers every week for the past 11 years, and let viewers — particularly ones who may not have been tuning into other inclusive series on cable or streaming — get to know and love a gay couple in all their ups and downs and trials and tribulations.”