Quick Take: Modern Family, "Family Portrait"
"It's my wife's dad's second wife so… legally okay but it's still weird." – Phil
Review: Modern Family, "Family Portrait"
(S0124) The final episode of Modern Family's freshman season did not disappoint, proving it is one of the most consistently funny, entertaining, and endearing shows on television.
After the vacation antics of last week's "Hawaii," "Family Portrait" brings things home on multiple fronts, breathing fresh life and laughs into the communications and relationships of its interlaced (and modern) family units. In recent weeks, Phil Dunphy (Ty Burell) has delivered some of the strongest comedy, and that continued this week in his bumbling and earnest attempt to talk around his "kiss cam" kiss with Sofia (Gloria Delgado-Pritchett) at a Los Angeles Lakers basketball game. Some Three's Company-style miscommunication ensued, kicked off by Claire's (Julie Bowen) call to Phil when she and Haley (Sarah Hyland) saw dad on live television at the game (they watch Phil look at his phone and then summarily hang up). The gags then compound post-kiss cam kiss with Phil feeling the multiplying heat of getting "caught" relayed through daughter Alex' (Ariel Winter) inbound text messages.
Phil's mock interviews are classic during this sequence, with lines coming such as: "What people do in the privacy of their own sports stadium is their own business." What really got me rolling though was a seemingly throwaway line when Phil returned home, believing that Claire had watched her husband "cheat" on her on live TV: "I know you're mad at me, and I know this foam finger can't make up for everything."
Ed O'Neil as Jay also provided some of the episode's best moments as subject for grandson Luke's (Nolan Gould) school project to "interview someone who lived through the '60s." You could see Jay's eyes light up when he realized that he had carte blanche to literally make the 1960s his own, transforming his humdrum tale of working in a barber shop into a celebrity menagerie of hair cutting intriguing involving the likes of Martin Luther King, the Kennedys, the Nixons, and Buzz Aldrin ("How do you think he got his nickname?").
Claire's obsession over having the perfect family portrait – to freeze a moment in time – provided the more serious layer, an element that I've come to appreciate. There's a groundedness about the characters and situations that help the show to be interesting and watchable even when there's not a frenzy of site gags and jokes being tossed around. While Mitch's (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) ludicrous destruction of his house in attempting to eradicate an intruding pidgeon was funny, a show packed with that level of humor might wear thin. That said, Claire's mission did have a lot of humor packed around it, especially in giving Luke great physical comedy scenarios such as when he's smothered in plastic wrap to avoid getting dirty before the big shot. "It's hard to breathe," he utters. Luke again is used as an amazing prop in getting sent across a lawn beset by a live sprinkler. "Luke walks over there, Hurt Locker style, flips the switch, and boom!" Phil says.
The pursuit of perfection has multiple meanings, of course, relating how we all idealize what the perfect family, the perfect partner, the perfect kids would say and do and be. Modern Family does a truly remarkable turn in mining that familiar "family comedy" territory for consistent laughs, and – even more remarkably perhaps – making us care about these characters. A stellar first season ends, and I can't wait for more.
More thoughts on "Family Portrait":
Video: Modern Family, "Family Portrait"
Check out all the modern family portraiture in full from Hulu, while available:
Recap: Modern Family, "Family Portrait"
Cameron gets a gig as a wedding singer, leaving Mitchell home alone.
From Around the Web: Modern Family, "Family Portrait"
