This past summer, having finished full or partial rewatches of my go-to sitcoms—The Office, Parks and Recreation, New Girl, and Arrested Development—I went looking for something I hadn’t seen and landed on Modern Family. Modern Family aired on ABC from 2009 through 2020. I went to undergrad from 2012 through 2016, and yet, very few of my friends ever mentioned the show. We talked about other shows—How I Met Your Mother, The Office, Community—constantly, but Modern Family rarely came up. Part of this was access, as all those others were, at the time, easily accessible on Netflix. But there was something else, something about this show that didn’t seem to click with the same audience as most of those other great sitcoms of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
And yet, Modern Family has eleven seasons. It ran for over a decade. It amassed over 35 Primetime Emmy nominations and won the top prize for Outstanding Comedy Series for 5 consecutive years (for the first 5 seasons). This puts it in rare air historically speaking for sitcom TV, and yet, still, it rarely seems to come up in either casual or critical circles.
And I did find something really unique about Modern Family as it relates to other sitcoms: it’s a family sitcom, a friends sitcom, and a workplace sitcom all at once.
But for a show to run that long and garner that many awards, there must be something about it, so last summer, I started watching it to hopefully figure out why.
Most sitcoms fall, predominantly, into one of these three categories. There are family sitcoms—like The Simpsons, The Cosby Show, and Family Ties—that focus on family dynamics, the tension between siblings, and all manner of domestic drama. Then there are friend sitcoms—like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Seinfeld, and New Girl—that focus instead on a network of friends, and family relationships minimal to the plot. There are also workplace sitcoms—like The Office, Abbott Elementary, Scrubs, and Cheers—which center on (duh) a workplace with stories and plots related to the workplace. The categories aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. That 70s Show is a friends sitcom with a very important parental element to it. And often workplace sitcoms grow more into the friends dynamic over time, such as with The Office or Parks and Rec.
But Modern Family, which would see by the name to be a family sitcom, also has a good deal in common with the other categories as it focuses on how your family can become your friends and the labor that goes with keeping up family.
I’m 28 and have spent much of the last 5 years growing to be friends with my parents as I became a more established self-sufficient adult. This is rarely present in sitcoms as parents and kids are often seen as rivals in some form. Not so in Modern Family. Much of the first couple of seasons concerns internal growth among adults, as Jay grows to accept his son Mitchell’s gay identity and family, and Claire grows to accept Jay’s new younger wife, Gloria. These are father-child relationships—Jay with his son Mitchell and Claire with her father, Jay—but they are between fully established adults. Crucially they center not on week-to-week domestic dramas but on core matters of identity. Will Jay accept and embrace his gay son and modify his idea of family to include him? Will Claire accept Jay’s new wife and modify her idea of family to include a younger Colombian woman? The resolving of these questions creates ties of friendship between the characters that extend beyond the familial requirements.
As Claire and Phil’s kids—Haley, Alex, and Luke—get older, we see a similar thing happen in their relationships, especially with Haley. A ditzy and rebellious teenager, Haley grows up to relate to members of her family on a peer level, such as the trouble she has at college or when she goes out to dinner with members of her family. In one season 6 episode she’s going to a club/concert type thing with Mitchell and Gloria and the conflict of the episode is if Mitchell and Gloria are now too old to stay up late, not any tension with Haley as someone younger than them.
As interesting as this is, Modern Family is, I think, even more, unique for its treatment of labor as something that very much exists within the context of the family home. Especially related to Claire’s storylines in the early seasons, the show excels at showing the labor that’s involved in having and maintaining one’s family. The labor is both emotional and physical, as we see Claire and Phil recently running errands or taking the kids to and fro to obligations.
Moreover, several of the show’s best episodes concern labor. One personal favorite of mine is the season 5 premiere “Suddenly, Last Summer.” This wonderful episode has two storylines centered on family and labor. In the A-plot, Claire and Phil are trying to maximize their alone time over the summer while the kids are off doing things. They shrewdly negotiate with their kids in order to get a few days when they can be alone. At the same time, with gay marriage now legal in California, Mitchell and Cam individually try to orchestrate the perfect proposal. Of course, sitcoms have been doing stories about marriage proposals forever (I’m fond of Winston’s madcap antics on New Girl), but by having both members of the couple engage in such antics, Modern Family highlights how much time, energy, money, and labor goes into something like romantic love. It makes this point over and over again, with every grand gesture or elaborates Halloween display.
The highest-rated episode of the show—season 6’s “Connection Lost”—also centers on labor. In this episode Claire, while waiting at the airport, goes into full detective mode thinking Haley secretly ran off and got married. The inventive episode is told through FaceTime calls and other Internet research (not unlike the upcoming movie Missing). This is a clever means of storytelling, but it’s also one that highlights that the simple things of life, like making phone calls, can be quite complicated and time intensive. My mom frequently engages in long-distance business related to her family’s small farm corporation, and the endless string of messages and missed connections is its own kind of exhausting work.
It puts a unique spin on the common sitcom categories and does it with engaging characters and consistently clever writing.
Having now watched 6 seasons of Modern Family, I can say that I kind of get why this show ran so long and garnered so many awards.
Through its focus on friendship dynamics, rather than typical parent-child dynamics, it was a show that allowed its young characters to really grow with the show rather than aging out as usually happens in family sitcoms. It was also, of course, groundbreaking in its sincere and honest depiction of gay families several years before this common on TV (to the degree that it’s now gotten more common, but it is still a rarity). It really was an image of the modern 2010s family, one growing less concerned with traditional family dynamics and one adapting the new kinds of labor needed to keep the family running smoothly. We would all do well to keep this sitcom in the canon of the greats from this era.
