Modern Family - "Go Bullfrogs!"

Season 3, Episode 6

The best of the season, though that’s not saying much

Sometimes I think I’m too hard on Modern Family; I don’t mean this in the “I’m just a curmudgeon” sort of way, as some of you undoubtedly think of me. No, what I mean is that I sometimes wonder if I set my expectations to high, or that I’m viewing the first season, what I believe to be the show’s watermark, through rose colored lenses and that’s affecting how I view the show now. Modern Family may not be a great show, but it reliably delivers laughs in a family-friendly package, a rare commodity on television these days. And that’s got to count for something, right?

That’s how my line of thinking would have gone if I didn’t know that Modern Family is capable of greatness, as exemplified in the pilot and a number of other episodes since. “Go Bullfrogs!” isn’t nearly as good as those episodes, but it is perhaps the best episode of the season so far, and he does give me some – but just some – hope that the show could possibly turn around.

Over the past few weeks, I have talked repeatedly about how the show often rests on clichés to tell it stories; tonight’s episode highlighted the precarious position that the show put itself in simply by being a family comedy. The American family experience usually a very common one, to the extent that when you’re best friend in high school would shriek “I hate my parents” you could usually figure out pretty quickly what got them all upset. To put it another way: there are a lot of archetypes when it comes to our perception of “family”, as well as a lot of clichés, and it’s the former – which tend to be richer and more open for interpretation – that I think the show should embrace more.

To wit: two of tonight’s plotlines – Phil talking Haley to visit his alma matter, and Cam and Mitchell realizing that they are perhaps becoming too much of an “old couple” – are the sort of things that we’ve seen before, yes, but there also open ended, and they allow for some nice character work. Phil’s story with Haley, for instance, could have gone a few different ways while staying in that “daughter embarrassed by her father” vein, but instead of some big blowup, there was a nice, leisurely pace and ends with a sweet moment between the two. Cam and Mitchell’s storyline also ends with a sweet moment, like you knew it would, when they decide that their current life is just fine for them. But what made it work, I think, is that there were no big theatrics; it was a couple with a brief life crisis who calmly talked through it (while accidently taking someone else’s car from the valet station) and arrived back at stasis.

The other storylines unfortunately were a bit of a mixed bag. While I liked the idea of Claire finally getting a night to herself – and that that night out originally included Cam and Mitchell – and I also like the confrontation she had with the neighbor/former classmate. But her going out with a gay man who turns out to be straight was a bit obvious, and all the plot points didn’t fit together quite as tightly as I would have wanted. The Jay/Gloria/Manny subplot, meanwhile, may have been a good example of the comedic timing these three actors have with one another, but considering that the jokes stemmed from Jay becoming way too involved with a telenovela and Gloria fearing that Manny is doing what all 13-year-old-boys do, it all felt a bit old hat.

But what I really liked about his episode was that all of these stories sort of developed naturally. Claire’s attempts to have night out gives the show the lead it needs to explore Cam and Mitchell’s boring old life, and while I didn’t think the JGM plot was all that fresh, I did enjoy how the show weaved these two into one another so that there was a nice kinetic energy and the jokes didn’t become burdensome in their staleness.

In fact, the jokes were fairly crackin’ tonight. You may ask what the difference is between an archetype and a cliché is, and I’ll tell you the line is thin; you may wonder why I wasn’t bothered by the more reductive elements in the episode, and I’ll tell you that I don’t know. Maybe I really wasn’t as hard on the show tonight as I’ve been in the past. Maybe I thought the good outweighed the bad. Or maybe it’s because this is the first episode of the season where I didn’t feel like the show tried so hard to make comedy happen. It just felt like 22 minutes where I was allowed to look into the lives of characters I enjoy, and for now, that’s enough.

Quotes, Etc:

So Manny’s thirteen now? Anybody else caught off guard by that fact?

“He was shading his eyes from the sun.” “Knew it when I hit it.”

“What you mean ‘blosom’? Like the puberty?”

“Go, I can handle it. You’re not the first girl to leave me at this table with a plate full of chicken wings….I wish that were true…”

“I love it when a straight guy and a gay guy go out together.” “I’d like it better if he was gay.”

“And by the way, it’s a little cliché to pick someone who looks just your dad.”

“Bethany, do not grab the pinot.”

“Awww…even though you basically just called me fat.”

“He’s. Not. Getting. The Playboy. EVVVAAAAAA! He’s a little boy!”