May Diaries 26: Why Modern Family is a brilliant show

So I’ve been rewatching Modern Family and I’m not as obsessed with this show as I am with Friends but… I think it’s really brilliant.

Usually there’s a few stories going on at one time- and they usually end up coming together in the end- and they come up with good situations to get different members of the family together.

Let’s take The One With The Cuffs on Friends for example. The A story is Chandler getting handcuffed in Rachel’s boss’s office and begging Rachel to let him go while Rachel begs for him to stay handcuffed so she doesn’t get in trouble. The b story is Monica and Phoebe doing a catering job for Monica’s mom and the C story is Joey talking to a door to door salesman about Encyclepedias. They only interact with each other a few times, Ross is barely in the episode and Phoebe doesn’t get a story and the friends aren’t together a lot to talk about the situations.

In Modern Family- usually there’s some interactions between the stories and they have a bigger message at the end of the episode that kind of brings everyone together.

I’m going to use the episode Lifetime Supply as an example. In this episode Phil is freaking out about thinking the doctor is giving him bad news. His lifetime supply of razors runs out. Meanwhile Gloria has a dream about a black mouse, which she thinks is a bad omen. She is also going to the Dunphy house to help teach Hayley Spanish- and she tells Phil about the dream and then he gets more worried.

Jay and Manny go to the horse track with Manny’s dad and Jay tries to teach Manny not to end up like his dad.

With Cam and Mitch- Mitch gets an award and Cam puts an award he won for fishing when he was a kid next to it… and cam gets upset but then realizes he’s being petty about it and goes to put more of cams trophies on the mantel and they break because he gets scared of a black mouse in storage. So the black mouse theme is back- and he tells Gloria and Phil this too.

So everyone’s had similar things happening to them, they meet together to talk about it and everything gets resolved- and characters are involved in multiple stories while sort of having their own stories. And each character gets chances to interact with one another… it’s interesting how they do it and fun to watch.

So that’s just comparing the shows. I love them both but I feel like the way Modern Family weaves the stories together is pretty brilliant.

There’s a similar show I love called Life in Pieces- I need to see if that’s streaming somewhere to do a post on that… but Modern Family is brilliant and this is why!

Bye!

-Shannon