Yesterday (April 8, 2020), the very last episode of Modern Family aired, bringing to a close a (little over a) decade-long narrative. Yesterday was also the eleven-year anniversary of the death of my father, who had been in my life for a decade. Modern Family ran for eleven years and it's been eleven years since that 'first' April 8.
I started watching Modern Family every highly-anticipated Wednesday night not long after April 2008, and it's intro music still stirs up a stomach-deep kind of nostalgia. It's been a long time since I've watched it religiously, or watched anything on air, having since followed precedent to use streaming services. Even so, Modern Family is so familiar, that it seemed like a constant.
Throughout my elementary years, instances of elders treating me like I was smart and perceptive stuck with me. I still remember the gracious and impossibly cool adults from Circle Players with whom I felt like an equal, camp-counselors and teachers who spoke plainly and frankly with me, and Modern Family, which, despite my young age and incredible naïvety, never hit me over the head with a joke, but threw them aside like I was a young comic mastermind. Modern Family is smart, but even more impressively it makes its audience feel smart.
Equally astounding and inspiring is its ability to comfortably position viewers in a world potentially out of their comfort zone without "othering" any one area. It establishes the familiarity required to allow openness for exploring unfamiliarity, and in doing so never admonishes us or suggests that it's making us face our ignorance. Each household is equally dysfunctional, equally wonderful, and equally featured. While viewers might first choose one to call home, after a few episodes the distinct households come to collectively represent the dysfunctional beauty of any one viewer's unique family and experience.
Even beyond making me keener and kinder all while cackling, Modern Family showed me that a tv show can do that, a fictional story with which I've never directly interacted, can do that. It expected us to be perceptive and empathetic, and so we were.
It was my plan to conclude this with a carefully fashioned connection between these two April 8ths, over a decade apart, but I'm avoiding finales, I haven't even watched it yet. It's over, but I don't want it to end.
