By virtue of its name, Modern Family was always going to have an expiration date.
The snarkier and the snootier might scoff that the date came and went years ago. But a historic swath of viewers rode happily with the show into the sunset, which officially came Wednesday night after 11 seasons and 250 episodes. Of course, those lingering fans were tuning in for the comfort of the familiar, by this point remnants of something they fell in love with over a decade ago. In other words, arguably nothing modern at all.
It’s poignant to measure those 11 seasons. Children who were precocious tots when the series began are now full-blown adults. That is an inherently emotional way to mark time.
Harder to quantify, but just as profound, are the ways in which the TV landscape, entertainment industry, and cultural mood the series has aired during has evolved. Modern Family arrived at a tipping point. In fact, with its palatable, matter-of-fact progressiveness, it may very well have been the show that finally tipped the scale.
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. 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. As my friend Matthew Jacobs wrote in The Huffington Post, Modern Family became the “show that stayed the same while the rest of TV changed” around it.
The saving grace of Wednesday night’s hour-long series finale is that, while it will hardly rank among the greatest episodes the show has produced, it is an occasion to memorialize that very greatness.
Claire (Julie Bowen) and Phil (Ty Burrell) are living in an RV in their driveway, their house overrun by their grown children, son-in-law, and two grandkids. Desperate for peace, they rule that one of three adult kids has to move out. You don’t need to be a sitcom savant to figure out that, by the end of the hour, all three children will have fallen into circumstances that will have them packing their bags, leaving Claire and Phil with an empty nest.
Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) are living in a new house with their new adopted son and loving it, until their infant bliss is interrupted by a job offer in Missouri. Now they’re leaving, too. Gloria (Sofia Vergara) is also staring down the barrel of loneliness. Her son, Manny (Rico Rodriguez), is going away for a year. Is Jay (Ed O’Neill) equipped to pick up the emotional slack?
The episode was such a classic sitcom finale it almost felt as if you had seen it before. There were mix-ups, dramatic coincidences, bait-and-switches, miscommunications, and two big musical set pieces. Four different scenes mined group hugs for comedy and tears.
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