Modern Family wrapped up its Emmy-winning, 11-season run last night. Much of the two-part series finale was about change — Mitchell and Cameron move to Missouri, Phil and Claire go on an RV trip, Jay and Gloria head to South America to spend time with her family, etc. — but one thing that stayed the same was the format of the show.
Modern Family is presented as a mockumentary, with the characters speaking to an unseen crew, but as co-creator Christopher Lloyd told Entertainment Weekly, “we didn’t” consider pulling an The Office and presenting the footage as a “real” documentary.
“Look, it’s a valid idea. Obviously, we started out in our pilot having that person be a character. And then the more we thought about, we thought, “That might take the audience out of it.” And then having lived in a mockumentary form without literally a crew for 250 episodes, it felt like it might’ve been to meta or too cute to maybe do that for us,” Lloyd said. “The Office made you aware that they were actual people much more than we did. We were just using it as a technique more than a sort of an actual reality.”
You know what else stayed the same? Manny being annoying. Anyway, Lloyd was also asked what he hopes people will say about Modern Family in the future:
“I hope that they say, ‘Oh, that was a really well-made show. There was care in the writing of it. There was incredible professionalism and talent in the cast, and what it all added up to was a really rich experience of great laughs. I loved spending time with those characters, but also I found myself moved at the end, and that’s like a full meal.’ … The hope is that people remember it as a fuller experience than you sometimes get with a comedy and come back to it for the nourishment that comes from that.”
R.I.P. Modern Family. It’s hard to imagine another broadcast show ever winning Outstanding Comedy Series five years in a row ever again.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)