Modern Family: "The One That Got Away"

Season 2, Episode 24

A finale to match the rest of the season

“I miss the old Jay”

-The New Jay

So here we are at the end of not-great-as-it-could-have-been season for Modern Family, which failed to live up to the potential that we saw in its first season. It’s not that anything the show did this season was horrendously bad (though “Our Children, Ourselves” and “Bixby’s Back” were subpar), but the show didn’t push itself like it could have, and as we continued to see the same quality over and over again, the lack of creativity seemed to make the episodes subjectively worse. Modern Family found a groove that more or less works last season, and it’s been more than content to stay there.

It’s this thought that kept running through my mind while watching “The One That Got Away”, a good but not great way for the show to close off the season. Now, according to the production codes, this episodes and last week’s were flip flopped, most likely to end the episode on a larger emotional moment, and I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m glad that the show gave us this better episode as a end note, as I feel seeing “See You Next Fall” before four months of nothing would have left a sour taste in our collective mouth.

Now most of the episode centered on Jay, which is a risky move considering Ed O’Neil’s curmudgeonly nature tends to work better in small doses. Part of this stems from the fact that Jay isn’t the kind of person you would hang out with in real life, and part of it is due to the fact that the writers seem to bounce back and forth about how grumpy he is and how much his marriage/family has softened him up. Jay’s attitude tends to change depending on the whims of the story, and that can be distracting at times.

Luckily Jay’s birthday party served as more of a framing device than an actual plot, which allowed the episode to spin all of the characters into their own storylines and still have all of them feel like a connected whole. Unfortunately that also meant that the story felt overstuffed something like six storylines into the episode. Now half of these – Jay’s wish to go fishing, Mitch and Cam being frustrated with raising Lilly, and the Dunphy kids attempting to finish up their video present to Jay – weren’t really plots so much as bookends to the episode, and the first two only existed to tie into the actual plots.

My favorite of these actual plots was the Manny and Cam plot, mostly because I like when the show pairs the kids up with either him or Mitchell; it’s just fun to watch the kids’ inherent sloppy, unfocused nature bounce off the fairly prissy Cam and Mitchell. Now, Manny himself it’s as sloppy or unfocused as any of the other kids, but it still made for some fun moments as Cam tried to keep Manny calm as he helped him through the world of love.

I was less enthused about the Claire and Mitchell plot, if only because it felt a bit overstuffed. While I like the idea of Claire and Mitchell bonding while stuck up in a tree house, it felt like as if it too long to get that point, as it involved just a bit too much setup. And even when it did get to the two of them reminiscing, that too was overly complicated as the conversation bounced around to a lot of different things (are they really worried about Manny getting one-third of Jay’s estate?) that it felt a bit forced. And even though I recognized that we were meant to be moved by the fact that this lead to Mitchell’s decision to adopt another kid, this development worries me because it seems more like the show going back to the well as opposed to coming up with something new for these characters.

And then there was Phil/Gloria plot, which didn’t have a whole lot of emotion to it, but was nonetheless quite funny, and I’m okay with that, at least solely on the plotline’s merits.  Modern Family doesn’t have to deliver emotional moments every week to be good; sometimes it can just be funny and be just as good. But it’s when they start mix-matching the two, the emotional and the comedic, that the flaws in each become highlighted, and episode suffers for it. And maybe that’s why this season hasn’t lived up to our expectations.

Quotes, Etc.:

“You’re not giving him that.” “Even if he drinks his other gift first?”

“I only used this once, and that was to take a torte out of the oven.”

“I have a tennis racket that I only use as a bubble bath frother.”

“You know who did your job back in my day? A hose.”

“He didn’t stop for the yelling sailor in a tree.”

“No, it’s not what you think. I’m talking to a little boy.”

“She’s going yell at me. She can be so mean in Spanish.”

“I don’t think grandpa’s having too much fun. He keeps getting up to get drinks.”