It’s not like Modern
Family to start the season finale by killing off a character we haven’t even
met, but they do, and so the Pritchetts, Dunphys and Tucker clan convene in
Florida. But the air of grief is replaced with good ol’ Phil Dunphy (Ty
Burrell) humor when he embraces his neck pillow instead of Claire (Julie
Bowen), who stands hanging with open arms. Claire discovers a letters from
Phil’s mother to each of the Dunphy members (except for herself, and she didn’t
seem too stricken by it) inside a shoebox. The kids open their gifts, while
Alex (Ariel Winter), who initially boasted about her strong bond with her late
grandmother, receives only a lighter and no meaningful note. Phil was told from
beyond the grave to set his father up with a woman down the street, Annie
Fitzsimmons. Because the first thing you do when you die is to make sure your
husband doesn’t miss a beat in bed.
Mitchell (Jesse Tyler
Ferguson) accompanies Gloria (Sofia Vergara) to the court to remove a bench
warrant over a mistaken case of prostitution. Reluctantly, he ends up being a
lawyer for everyone else in the room. In the small Florida courtroom, Mitch
shows his A-Game on the court and would’ve brought Perry Mason to shame.
Jay (Ed O’Neill) has his
own little reunion with the woman who took his virginity before he was shipped
off to Vietnam. He tries to remind her about the time they were together, but
he later finds out that she has shagged more people than Wilt
Chamberlain.
Let's get
started:
The lack of grief by Phil
and his father Frank (Fred Willard) is disconcerting. But Phil’s love for his
mother creeps up on him as well as the audience as he tells Annie Fitzsimmons
lovely anecdotes about his mother. The funeral hits home for many people, as
Alex’s voiceover reads the hidden letter her grandmother wrote to her, and the
season ends with a bang. Literally. There were fireworks and everything.
Watching new
episodes in season 4 has been riddled with thoughts like “Make me laugh,
dammit” and “that joke does not deserve my physical laughter but it’s funny
enough for me to exhale harder than usual.” Although Modern Family’s ratings
are still raking up 9-12 million viewers per episode, this season feels like
watching a dog chasing around his own tail; very repetitive. It doesn’t hold up
to the first three, Emmy-winning seasons. The writers depend too much on lame
banter between the families, and the idiocy of the Dunphy household (aside from
Alex). The jokes, although funny, are becoming more predictable. Whatever
happened to, “love is just around the corner…I live in a neighborhood with a
lot of prostitutes.” The show is still doing very well and is still the number
1 scripted program, but it might be in its early stages of dwindling to a
kind-of-funny-sometimes comedy, and we don’t want this show to swim in TV Show
Hell along with The Simpsons and Glee.
Alex, Luke (Nolan Gould), and Manny’s (Rico Rodriguez) storylines were quite
weak in season 4. Which should be the opposite case, because they’re all
hitting puberty and there is nothing more exciting than watching teenagers hit
that awkward, hormone-driven stage in their lives. Alex has always been the
smart one in the family, and Luke the ADHD halfwit. But no one stays who
they are once they become teenagers. Alex’s character has stayed flat (as
opposed to her C-cups, which literally grew from an A to a D from one episode
to the next), and Luke’s dumb comments are getting old. It was cute and funny
when he was still a pre-teen, but give him better lines. I’m pretty sure Nolan
Gould—a Mensa member—can handle more sophisticated jokes.
Manny is still a woman-loving poet, and it’s sad to see him chase woman after
woman after woman, to no avail. He hasn’t succumbed to the pressures of high
school either, and he’s stayed true to himself for 4 seasons. When is Manny
going to go through a Goth phase à la Alex and Skylar? A bullied chubby
Latino in high school is bound to a) kill everyone b) be ripped so he kill
everyone or c) not want to go to school altogether. He seems way too happy for
a fat Columbian in a Los Angeles public school.
Season 4 has brought
Haley (Sarah Hyland) to college and out of college, and it’s probably because
having Haley in the show solely though videos on iChat just wasn’t working well
enough. Good on the writers for bringing the 44th sexiest woman back on the
episodes. But there’s not much a college dropout can do at home other than bum
around and screw her bovine boyfriend (who is way too slow and dumb for someone
not be under the influence of something).
Mitchell and Claire have always been running around from job to job, whilst the
other adults have stayed relatively stable in theirs. Claire has been hogging
some of the episodes by job hunting. First it was for town council (who runs
for town council just for a stop sign?), then recreating a baseball
field, which led to flipping a house with Cam, a short-lived position as Gil
Thorpe’s assistant, and now maybe as Jay’s successor for his closet business.
It’s as if the writers don’t even know what Claire should be doing.
Mitchell
has been on and off with his job as a lawyer. The season finale was a
stepping-stone for him to go back to court. Cam has always been supportive of
his partner’s career decisions but these two lovers seem to have a lot of
trouble in gay paradise. It’s a wonder how they still stay with each other when
the amount of time Mitchell rolls his eyes at Cam is equivalent to the amount
of time Gloria says, “In Columbia.”
Get ready, Modern
Family, you need to bring it next season.
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