Modern Family: "Bixby's Back" - Old Storylines, Revisited

Once I do a Google search for songs that contain the lyric “picture me naked,” I'll offer up a review of last night's episode, after the jump...

While acknowledging that there were a total of four storylines in last night's episode, I would like to focus on two in particular – those of Claire/Phil and Manny/Haley – as I believe they serve as good evidence of how a show should approach bringing back old storylines.

I will start with the more obvious callback, that of Claire/Phil, which was one subject of last year's great Valentine's Day episode. Given how great that one was, and how funny Phil was as Clive Bixby, I can understand why the writers thought that it would be a good idea to bring back this plot. Yet while this plot was funny (mostly because of Phil), it was also really predictable. To do a plot and have things go terribly wrong, and then to rehash the plot a year later and have things go terribly wrong YET AGAIN is just terribly lazy writing. If the show had really wanted to surprise, it should have added some sort of twist on the storyline this year, instead of just having Phil be the one who ends up without his clothes this time around.

In the same vein, we could call the Manny/Haley plot a rehash, but I think that would undersell the differences between its two appearances. Manny's creepy crush on Haley was introduced at the beginning of last season, before the show had really had a chance to fully flesh out its characters, especially the kids. (Whereas “My Funky Valentine aired later, when the show was more sure of its characters.) While the first time through the suggestion of Manny liking Haley was mostly just a gag, played for uncomfortable laughs, here it was a lot more nuanced, and the characters seemed to shine through the jokes. Take the way that Manny slowly sells Haley the idea of discovering herself, or the way in which the show digs into Haley's psyche to reveal that she is unsure of herself as a lone figure. While it wasn't given much running time, the show deftly used it to say a few things about these two characters.

I don't begrudge Modern Family for making references to events of past episodes. Things from out pasts due come up from time to time, so I can see how this would add an air of realism to the show (fitting, since its shot in a nominally documentary style). Yet this is comedy, and comedy is built on the unexpected; what's more expected than watching the same jokes we've seen before? Nor can I ignore the fact that the only two times we have dealt with Claire and Phil trying the “stranger in the night” game have both arisen on Valentine's Day. I can see the writer's influence in that fact, and that undercuts any sort of reality the show is trying to sell us.

What did everybody else think, of these two storylines, or just the episode in general?


Additional Thoughts:

“No one walks anymore!”

“And bam! She looks like an idiot! And isn't that what Valentine's Day is all about?”

“Gasp. I'm shocked.”

“You look hot enough to cook a pizza on...in....”

“A big, gay angel.”