Making the Case: Modern Family is the Greatest Sitcom On Television

Modern Family is arguably the most successful sitcom currently airing on television. The Big Bang Theory gets better ratings, but Modern Family holds the tie for the record of winning the most ever Emmys for Best Comedy Series, and continues to receive a significant amount of mainstream critical praise as its seventh season comes to an end. Some alternative critics are starting to claim the show is losing its muster, and in fact more cynical audiences have long been complaining the show represents a certain complacency found smeared all over network sitcoms. This is a pretty negative way to look at things, though, especially considering fans who watch sitcoms because they like jokes are in agreement, Modern Family is still one of the best shows on television.

Modern Family excels above the rest of today’s current crop of network sitcoms by eschewing the growing belief in television that continuing plotlines and deep character development are necessary for a show to survive. Outside of a lifelong partnership turning into a marriage after the United States law finally caught up with society, not a whole lot has changed within the Pritchett-Dunphy-Delgado-Tucker dynasty. The kids are getting older and spending more time in school when the plot calls for it, but the basic dynamics and character beats remain pretty much the same. While it’s true this hurts the long-term storytelling capabilities of the show, it’s worth noting this in no way hurts their ability at joke telling. You don’t need deep, emotional storytelling to pull off a simple sitcom plot like the kids throw a party and the parents come comically close to finding out for 22 minutes, you just need a good joke to put a pin on the old cliché. Modern Family creatively made the most responsible parents get high for the first time immediately before the party. Not a bad pin.

When Modern Family debuted in 2009, it was met with almost universal critical acclaim, and the ratings reflected the fact audiences loved it too. Fans particularly enjoyed the premise of the show—that people of all races and sexualities can and do exist in various extended families. This gimmick led to one of the few sustained critiques the show receives, though, in that if the show is supposed to be making a serious social statement about a family like this, they aren’t exactly enlightening the world in that regard. It’s true the show could be more of a vehicle for social justice, but they aren’t trying to do so outside of some really basic character beats. Once people accept the social justice factor of Modern Family is understated and stop expecting that to be the focus, the show starts to look a whole lot like an updated version of what is generally considered one of the greatest sitcoms of all time: All in the Family.

All in the Family was significantly more upfront about its position as a leading social critic in the 1970s than Modern Family is today, but in many ways it fits within the standard outline for any sitcom that has ever appeared on network television. Just like its modern counterpart, All in the Family focused on a growing family extended through friends from various social and racial backgrounds, and the older characters on the show occasionally had trouble understanding the younger characters on the show and their attempts at young adulthood in then present day America. It’s easy to see Jay Pritchett as a facsimile of a modern Archie Bunker and presume the show is therefore taking over as the preeminent social critic of the day, but Modern Family intentionally dispelled any chance of that in their very first episode.

In Modern Family’s pilot, long time gay partners Cam and Mitchell adopt a child. Mitchell’s father Jay is a heavily reticent about the idea of his son adopting a child with another man, but Jay immediately comes around when he sees how happy the family looks together. This is the Modern Family universe’s sustained message on social justice: the whole world should just fucking understand it by now, and all they should need to do is show it, and people should be smart enough to figure out the rest on their own. There has been criticism – Cam and Mitchell fight too much, or that they don’t seem to be extremely affectionate for such an allegedly loving married couple, but that describes most couples in the center of network sitcoms. In fact, it beats the hell out of the most notable network attempts at trying to portray a gay couple in the past.

When Will & Grace aired its first season, there were actually people referring to the show as “the gay Seinfeld.” A few years earlier, Ellen was famously the first network sitcom to focus on a gay character, and that show handled the idea very respectfully, which is why Ellen DeGeneres is an LGBT icon to this day. Unfortunately, Ellen coming out of the closet also killed her show, while Will & Grace was a wildly popular show for the eight seasons it was on the air. Will & Grace took social justice in a different direction, too, by digging into every reductive and stereotypical view of gay people in modern society and turning them into a breakout character named Jack McFarland. Jack was openly and flamboyantly gay, and that was a big part of his appeal. There’s often little argument he was the funniest character on the show, but it often came at the cost of reinforcing hurtful and damaging stereotypes the gay community is still desperately trying to end to this day.

The fact that Modern Family isn’t reductive is in and of itself progressive for a major network sitcom—the major gay couple is actually no different from 90% of couples in the sitcom milieu. Cam can act a bit stereotypically at times, and a few of his and Mitchell’s friends are closer to Jack than either of them, but there’s almost always a gag placed on top of the stereotype that says we’re supposed to roll our eyes at it and understand what it was. Only Happy Endings has attempted to present gay relationships in such an open and realistic fashion on network television, but for whatever reason, that show wallowed in obscurity during its brief three-season run. Ironically, that show was way more modern than Modern Family, but that could be why it didn’t succeed—Modern Family is as modern as a network sitcom is capable of being while still being successful. Going any further either tends to push things in the wrong direction or turn fans away because they aren’t ready to accept it. So, the writers are left to focus on writing funny jokes. And this, again, is where Modern Family succeeds above virtually every sitcom on the air today.

I mentioned up top that nothing really changes on Modern Family, and that’s exactly how things should be on a network sitcom. The most critically lauded sitcoms of all time are shows like Seinfeld, Cheers, the aforementioned All in the Family, Friends—shows where the plots could all famously be described as nothing ever happening. Even with the social justice factor, All in the Family was more or less just a family hanging out, and all of those other shows were just a group of friends hanging out, and Modern Family didn’t exactly do anything special by combining the two. The only two sitcoms on cable that quite match the longevity or fan appeal of network TV are It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and South Park, and these too are shows primarily based on friends and families who almost never make any real progress in their lives. Newer critical darlings like Girls and Veep have weightier stakes on the line, but the characters are still just people hanging out living their lives. The newer shows need to make the choice between whether or not they want their characters to grow to deeper, fuller human beings, or if they want them to remain virtually the same. The recent seasons of those shows imply they’ll probably keep growing, but TV history means that will prevent them from ever being as popular as Modern Family, because the eventual lasting test of a sitcom is whether or not you can watch an episode at random and laugh at it.

If the set up to a joke takes seasons worth of character development before a single laugh, maybe that makes the experience more personal for you, but that makes the experience meaningless for anyone who didn’t watch every episode before that moment. In Modern Family, the only thing that matters is the present. Anyone who has seen any episode of any sitcom can figure out everything they need to know about the PDDT family at first glance, and they’ll never be presented with a scenario where they need to know anything more than what’s happening on screen at that exact moment. Every cliché is on display, but proudly so, because they don’t want to waste any time on backstory. They’re extremely serious about the whole modern thing. And they’re still making it funny.

 

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