Modern Family - "Dude Ranch"/"When Good Kids Go Bad"

Season 3, Episode 1-2

And the Emmy for least improved comedy goes to….

When Modern Family won the Emmy for Best Comedy last year, it was a decision that was more or lauded amongst the critical community. Though it wasn’t the best comedy of the 2009-2010 season – that was probably a tie between Community and Parks and Recreation, but they weren’t among the nominated – but it was perhaps the best on the list of nominees – which included weak seasons of both 30 Rock and The Office – and it was a great show in its own right. The fact that it was a family sitcom that was legitimately funny was nothing to sneeze at, and the show deserved the recognition for the difficult task of reviving a long-dead subgenre.

This year, when the show won Best Comedy for a second time, the decision was received with a large amount of derision. It wasn’t just that there were better comedies in the nomination list – this time, Parks and Recreation was nominated – but that the show had gotten under a lot of critics nerves for its drop in quality during its second season, a time when most shows actually tend to get better. Rewarding a show that just seemed to be resting on its laurels felt cheap, and what’s even more frustrating is that most people didn’t even seem to notice.

So what are these mysterious problems that plague the show? (Un)luckily, tonight’s two-episode premiere actually answered that question, but thankfully the problems were split amongst the two, with the second episode being the stronger of the two. So let’s take them in turn:

“Dude Ranch”

During its second season, 30 Rock began to occasionally introduce an episode predicated on a sitcom trope, only to tear that trope apart by episode’s end, and it made for great comedy. Unfortunately, somewhere toward the end of its third season, the show started to forget to tear apart those tropes, and that meant that the episode sort of just limped along to an obvious conclusion.

Modern Family has never gone about breaking down old tropes; when an episode introduces a trope, you can bet it will follow through with it to the most obvious conclusion. Sure the show can still sneak in some funny lines here and there, but the stories themselves won’t be funny, and the episode as a whole begins to falter. “Going to a dude ranch” is the kind of sitcom staple that felt tired even in the early 90s, and unfortunately the show didn’t even try to do anything new with it either.  

The show gets points for having the entire family in one place (more on that later), yet it failed to use this to any new comedic effect. In fact, the show didn’t do much with the stories that it did try to tell, which was yet another problem. Thought comedies are allowed to have the occasional runner to supplement the other actual plots, oftentimes MF will mistake a series of runners for a full-fledged story. Such “stories” tonight included Phil’s attempts to impress Jay (again), Hank, the Dude Ranch host (played wonderfully by Tim Blake Nelson) hitting on Gloria, and Alex getting kissed by the sorriest walking Jersey accent I have ever seen. I won’t admit that these stories didn’t have resolution, or that Phil and Gloria’s stories didn’t nicely intersect, but nothing really happened by the end of them. Nothing changed about Phil and Jay’s relationship, Gloria still hasn’t cheated on Jay, and Alex just kissed that boy a few more times.

Of the two other stories, I would like to focus on the Mitchell one. (The Dylan storyline was more or less fine.) Though Mitchell and Cam spent most of the first season as two of the best written gay characters on television, somewhere in season two the writer’s general laziness and reliance on narrative crutches and shortcuts began to affect those two as well, and they soon began to display unacceptably higher levels of stereotypically gay behavior. Now longer did they break those assumptions down by proving they could do more “straight” things, and it became harder and harder to take them seriously as characters. They were simply at times caricatures.

This informed Mitch’s storyline tonight. While I give the show credit for basing it on a real emotion like “I want to be able to bond with my son by doing more masculine activities”, the show squandered this good will by turning Mitch into some sort of sissy-boy fairy. (This wasn’t nearly as bad and some of Cam’s past storylines, which have been atrociously offensive in their reliance on stereotypes.) It wasn’t funny, and it took away from what could have been a more moving story. But hey, at least we got to see Luke blow up a bird house.

“When Good Kids Go Bad”

Earlier I mentioned the show’s tendency to isolate each family by itself, a move that isn’t logically wrong from any storytelling standpoint, but it is a pattern that tends to get tedious and underutilizes the show’s ensemble cast. Thus I was going to call shenanigans on this episode given how the families were separated, especially after an episode that had them all in the same place but didn’t use that setup well enough.

But then came that ending; the show has done the occasional episode where the families are separated for most of the running time and then come together in the last few minutes of screen time, as if that makes up for the earlier separation. Yet these only really work if the families can play off of one another, if the stories feel like they intersect, as they were able to do here. While not as satisfying as a full on family-swap, I did enjoy seeing the storylines kind of crash into one another. It’s not the best example of that kind of storytelling – very few shows do it as well as Seinfeld did – but the episode does get points for showing us some new things about the family, especially how Claire and Mitch’s childhood shaped who they are today.

That one of these was a story in which Claire was a shrill nag kind of brought things down a bit, but it was brought up by the fact that this storyline did use a runner effectively, especially when the ‘Luke sleeps in the attic’ gag came full circle with the closing tag. I also loved that another story played off of Jay and Manny’s relationship, which is perhaps my favorite pairing out of the whole bunch, even if it is an intra-family connection. I also enjoyed that both of these episodes finally gave Mitch and Cam a full story with emotional weight, as it seems as if we are in for a long haul with their quest to adopt a son.

Let’s just hope that future episode manage to use that storyline to its full effect.

Quotes, Etc:

So, there’s a new actress playing Lilly, but I’m going to hold off a few more episodes until I pass judgment. But since I’m sure some of you have some more immediate opinions you’d like to share, sound off below.

“It’s called production value.”

Apparently Phil thinks pancake eating as a “cowboy skill”.

“It’s form Germany. If they had this during the war, we’d all be knee-deep in strudel.”

“I rode a horse for the first time today/I wasn’t surprised when it went ‘NEIGH!’”

“‘Buffalo Phil.’ Totally worth the wait.”

“DYLAN!” “What?” “WHERE ARE YOU?” “Wyoming!”

“Only we touch our women when they don’t want us to!”

“Wait, I’ve got something to say to you…We will only be checking ‘somewhat satisfied’ on our comment card.”

*********

“No, that’s not weird. My sister was born with a full set of teeth.”

“We bought matching hats.” “You are going to your room.”

“There’s a line of ants to the bag of Halloween candy in my closet, and I don’t want to still be there when they get tired of it.”

“I dunno Claire, it’s got a lot of potential. It’s a lot nicer than the attic I was living in when we first met.”

“She looks like she was dipped in glue and dragged through a flea market.”

“The attic?” “At least it’s big. Grandpa says you use to live in a closet.”

“A childhood without tumbling? You knew this and stood by and did nothing?”