Farewell Modern Family, you changed TV for the better.
MODERN FAMILY IS ENDING SOON, BUT ITS LEGACY IS DIVERSIFYING TV
When ABC announced this week that Modern Family had been renewed for its 11th and final season, and will wrap up for good in 2020, the reaction was fairly muted. Sure, it’s always noteworthy when a long-running show prepares to bid farewell, and some fans were sad to hear the news — however, for most regular viewers, it just means the DVR gets slightly less crowded.
Even if the collective reaction is a shrug, it’s worth looking back at the comedy’s somewhat groundbreaking beginnings to remember it helped change TV.
The show launched when network comedies were considered a dying breed. While CBS had luck with series such as Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, other broadcast channels had mostly given up. Then along came Modern Family. ABC executives had such high hopes that, in a rare move, they screened the entire pilot for advertisers at the New York upfront presentations in May 2009, four months before the actual première. Advertisers loved it — as did the many TV critics and reporters in the audience.
Most of the cast (besides Ed O’Neill of Married ... with Children fame) were complete unknowns. O’Neill starred as the wealthy family patriarch, Jay, married to his second wife, Gloria (Sofia Vergara), a much younger Colombian woman who had a preteen son. His daughter, Claire (Julie Bowen), was married to the goofball Phil (Ty Burrell), and they had three kids. His son, Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), lived with his partner, Cameron (Eric Stonestreet); in the series première, they adopted a baby girl from Vietnam.
That type of large, diverse blended family was unusual for a sitcom, which typically had a nuclear family structure, if not a slight variation. But given the solid ratings for Modern Family, which averaged nearly 10 million viewers an episode in its first season, it signalled that audiences craved something new.
“It had sort of everything: the gay couple with a child, the nuclear family, the stepfamily, all in one,” said Tim Brooks, a former network executive and TV historian. “So with that premise, it attracted attention and an audience ... and in my experience, (a TV series) has to go beyond being a ‘message’ show. It has to have characters you care about and relationships you care about.”
The show quickly became a hit, and racked up tons of awards; its Emmy Award domination became a running joke as it triumphed in the best comedy category from 2010 through 2014, tying Frasier for five consecutive wins. In 2011, then-President Barack Obama said it was his family’s favourite show.
The most influential aspect of the series, however, was Mitch and Cam’s relationship; the show featured their wedding episode the year after the Supreme Court struck down California’s Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage. In 2015, the Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber wrote about the impact a couple like Mitch and Cam had on prime-time audiences, even though viewers had seen gay TV characters for years, from All in the Family to Will & Grace to Glee.
“Cam and Mitch have been about as tame as anyone could ask — in contrast to the straight couples they hang out with, they rarely touch, never talk about sex and make a big deal over kissing in public,” he wrote. “But the fact remains that each popular depiction of gay life helped encourage networks to take chances on others, and today there’s unprecedented diversity in representation of sexuality on television, as shown in programs like Empire and Orange Is the New Black.”
In an interview with Southern California Public Radio, Salon reporter Andrew O’Hehir raised a similar point, especially as Mitch and Cam were portrayed similarly to the other loving but often bickering couples.
“Modern Family, a show that is about as mainstream as you can get and was watched by millions of people every week, I think it was really making LGBT people, same-sex households, appear normal as ridiculous or as boring or as noble or as ordinary as everybody else,” O’Hehir said. “And I think the effect of that in ideological terms is very profound over the decades.”
In addition to opening doors for other same-sex couples on TV, Modern Family helped bring back the sitcom. Co-creator Steve Levitan told the Los Angeles Times in 2011 he kept “hearing about this Modern Family effect,” as the paper declared he was “being lauded for spearheading the recent renaissance of comedy on TV.”
These shows took different forms of comedy, such as Fox’s millennial-focused New Girl or NBC’s snarky Up All Night, leading up to CBS’s dramedy Life in Pieces and ABC’s 1980s throwback The Goldbergs. Either way, other producers and showrunners got the message that this kind of programming worked.
Of course, as the years went on, the show lost its lustre; its Emmy nominations slowed down and then stopped completely. But as the show gets ready to sign off in a year, there are plenty of viewers who will truly miss it, as it came to resemble comfort food.
“I think that the audience will really remember it as a show that really tried to provide interesting storylines about the lives of just ordinary people,” said Catherine Luther, a professor at University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media. “That’s what was so nice.”
It had sort of everything: the gay couple with a child, the nuclear family, the stepfamily, all in one . ... In my experience, (a TV series) ... has to have characters you care about and relationships you care about. — Tim Brooks,
former neTwork execuTive and Tv hisTorian.