Modern Family: "See You Next Fall"

Season 2, Episode 23

Do the ends justify the means?

“It’s the juxtaposition of absurdist comedy against a formal setting.”

-Cam

In the past few years, the standard for television comedies has been raised, to the point that we expect most “good” comedies to be able to deliver both the comedy and the pathos. And for a while, many shows struggled with the second part of that equation, delivering moments that feel cliché and/or unearned. But more recently, the reverse has begun to happen, as shows begin to lose their humor in the quest to deliver those emotional beats.

Enter “See You Next Fall”. I don’t want to say that this wasn’t funny – it was at times – but it was never as funny as I felt that it could have been. The biggest problem here was that the half-hour was over-packed, and out attentions was distributed among the Alex/Haley, Phil/Claire, Cam/Mitchell, and Jay/Gloria plots, even if these plots actually took place at/within the same physical location for most of the episode. (Okay, so the Alex plot was kept separate for most of the episode, but everybody ended up at the school by episode’s end, so I’m counting it.) The upshot of all of this was that the none of these plots really evolved beyond a strong of jokes, so the final emotional moments, which were fairly strong, didn’t land quite as well as they could have is the plots preceding them had more time to develop.

This may be unfair, but I think most of this could have been fixed by excising the very pointless Cam and Mitchell plot, which had no emotional beat at all. Though that fact makes it a little more useless than the other, it’s not really why I found it so grating. No the real problem was that it wasn’t that funny. I suspect that this plotline was supposed to be some sort of dissection of the current state of comedy, and that we weren’t really supposed to laugh at Cam falling down. (At least I hope not.) Yet I didn’t find Mitchell laughing at Cam (which I suppose we were supposed to laugh at as a type of anti-comedy) funny either, which left the whole plotline feeling very lifeless. And since this plotline met up with two others, they also suffered, at least when the show tried to transition from this one to another.

Nor did the Jay/Gloria plot really help things out either. Now, I am generally a fan of the Jay and Gloria relationship, and I’m a bit of a sucker for any resolution that lets us know that these two actually love each other. What can I say? I’m a sucker for stuff like this. But the fact that this beat was based around the fact that Jay got Botox – a joke that was old several years ago. Now, the show did manage to find some personal spin on some of the jokes here, so it wasn’t a total waste, but the central joke was still tired, and the rest of the plotline suffered because of it.

The two most powerful plotlines tonight, both of which came from the Dunphy household, succeeded mostly by placing two characters in a situation and having them bounce off of one another. It’s a bit of a safe/lazy move, depending on how you look at these things, but at least these two storylines were more about the relationship at play than some one-note joke. The Phil/Claire storyline was the funnier of the two, mostly because this is the relationship the show seems most comfortable writing back-and-forth exchanges for. The emotional beat, however, wasn’t quite as strong as it could have been, because in an attempt at comedic reversal, the show ended up underselling Phil’s actual sense of remorse at the loss of Alex’s childhood.

Conversely, the Alex/Haley storyline was better at the emotional beat than it was the comedy. The show often seems to consider the children last when writing episodes, when it should probably put them higher on the list. Take tonight’s storyline as proof of that, as while the comedic tit-for-tat between the two sisters wasn’t as sharp as it should be at this point in a show’s life, most likely because the writers haven’t written enough screen time for the two in which this relationship can grow. Yet the emotional twist here – that Haley actually likes/respects Alex – which is something that the show has done before, but still managed to land because, well, the show doesn’t give us quite enough examples of this for it to feel old yet.

It wasn’t a banner night for Modern Family, and I can only hope that the show can pull out a win in next week’s finale. Our least give us an episode that doesn’t have a fat man falling down.

Quotes, Etc.:

“It’s happening people. Our hubris will be our undoing.”

“They will hurt you with a hurtful, rhythmic taunt.”

“What were you thinking? You’re a veteran!”

“Do you think he got his butt done too? It looks fantastic.”

“I just want to hug and embarrass them in front of their friends.”