Modern Family

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Clarissa

March 28, 2015

Has anybody seen this horrible little sitcom titled Modern Family? Bleh, what a nasty show. I’m yet to figure out what’s supposed to be so modern about this cast of dinosaurs.

Yes, there is a gay couple, stereotyped to the extreme, but that’s it in terms of modernity. The Latin American prostitute, her sleazy Latino ex-husband who looks like a pimp, their obese child, the plastic parents of 3 who look like people who spend their lives at the surgeon’s and not at the playgrounds, the patriarchal mother whose 40-year-old daughter puts up with vicious bullying for no reason that anybody in 2015 can understand.

Sitcoms are not supposed to make sense, I know. But this one is just too out there.

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27 responses to “Modern Family”

A.Anon

March 28, 2015

I have seen the first few episodes, and I hate the show! The worst thing is the show’s obsession with stay-at-home parents. This is supposed to be a show set in 2015, yet there is not a single family with two working parents!

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1. cliff arroyo
  
  March 28, 2015
  
  Are there many sitcoms with small children and two working parents? The only one I can think of off the top of my head would be Roseanne (though the youngest wasn’t that young).
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 28, 2015
    
    I thought both parents in this show were unemployed. I thought the point was that the rich father was keeping that whole bunch of losers. But I only watched maybe 3 episodes.
    
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  2. David P. Bellamy
    
    March 28, 2015
    
    “Are there many sitcoms with small children and two working parents?”
    
    Not a recent example, but The Cosby Show fits this description.
    
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    1. cliff arroyo
      
      March 28, 2015
      
      Good catch! I didn’t think of it because I didn’t have a tv for most of the 80’s and didn’t much care for the show the very few times I did see it.
      
      I appreciated what they were trying to do, it was just never very funny.
      
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  3. Shakti
    
    March 28, 2015
    
    You’re right. There aren’t many.
    
    Fresh Off the Boat:
    The dad owns a struggling restaurant, and the mother is also active in the restaurant. She also becomes a real estate agent. They have three children, the oldest of which is 11.
    Blackish
    The dad’s an advertising exec, the mom is an anesthesiologist, they have four children and the youngest is 6. I haven’t watched it.
    The Cosby Show
    The dad was an OB-GYN; the mom was a lawyer, but there was no real reference to her working in the sitcom episodes (more background info than everything else) and functioned like a stay at home mom. They had five children.
    The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
    The uncle is a lawyer who becomes a judge, the aunt is a professor for the first couple of seasons, after which they changed the actress and her character to a stay at home mom and added a fourth child named after all the members of Boyz II Men.
    
    I just realized that none of these sitcoms have white leads.
    
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    1. cliff arroyo
      
      March 28, 2015
      
      The few episodes I saw of FPoBA didn’t have young children.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 28, 2015
        
        Where are the young children in Modern Family? Except for the Chinese infant, everybody else is school age.
        
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        cliff arroyo
        
        March 28, 2015
        
        My memory isn’t sharp, but I thought the youngest son was still in elementary school (or early middle school).
        
        In the US that I grew up in, you were a child until you were 12 or so (though when I grew up 6 year olds had more freedom than 15 year olds do now…..)
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 28, 2015
        
        “In the US that I grew up in, you were a child until you were 12 or so (though when I grew up 6 year olds had more freedom than 15 year olds do now…..)”
        
        The last thing a 12-year-old needs is to have parents constantly hanging around. There will be time for that after he goes off to college and then on the job market. 🙂 🙂
        
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cliff arroyo

March 28, 2015

Sitcom characters are always (at least in the beginning) extremely broad archetypes / stereotypes (rather like soap operas).

I didn’t hate Modern Family but I stopped after one season. And while the characters didn’t exactly….. grow there was some development from the earliest episodes.

Part of the humor in the first season was supposed to revolve around things like the Latina (who could certainly do better if she were a golddigger) really loving her schlubby second husband or the hyper perfectionist children of said schlubby father.

My favorite character was the father who tried way too hard to relate to his kids (some of his scenes with his oldest daughter’s boyfriend were funny in their extreme awkwardness).

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 28, 2015
  “Part of the humor in the first season was supposed to revolve around things like the Latina (who could certainly do better if she were a golddigger)”
  
  No, she couldn’t. Purchasing foreign wives is in fashion only among the blue-collar workers from small villages. There was a time in the 1980s when every CEO had a silent, shadowy Thai or Japanese wife but that was 30 years ago.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    March 28, 2015
    
    Well I agree with you in general that the show is anything but “modern.” But the Latina character isn’t a mail order bride. She is supposed to have been an immigrant from Columbia and had some sort of job in the US when she met the old man character. The whole show hinges on the fact that she is supposed to be in love with him.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 28, 2015
      
      “But the Latina character isn’t a mail order bride. ”
      
      I’m not seeing a huge difference based on how her services are delivered. 🙂
      
      “The whole show hinges on the fact that she is supposed to be in love with him.”
      
      This is precisely how Latin American women act around the men who bought them and then tell their friends, “I was trying not to gag the whole time when he touched me but it was so difficult!” I used to hang out with a group of such women back in Montreal. Of course, their purchasers were all young and very attractive. And still, enacting “love” was an endless torture. And now imagine enacting “love” towards the horrible fellow on that show.
      
      Hispanic people are as human as you and I. Would you be in love with that old guy? Would I? Obviously not. Tragically, these are often cultures where women are only valued as pieces of meat. So they are trained from childhood to conceal their feelings and needs and project this gushy, oversexed persona that will make it easy to sell their services.
      
      One of the friends from this group (an immigrant from Colombia) was the daughter of a guy who owned several brothels back in Cali. He’d take her on the rounds of the brothel since she was a toddler, making her observe as he beat and sexually abused the prostitutes. So of course, the possibility of attaching herself to a single client – even if she was physically ill from every sex act with him – was an enormous achievement. Of course, the (young and very beautiful) client could not have guessed that she would refer to him in Spanish as “this idiot, this shit, this loser, etc.” right in front of him. The cloyingly sweet persona was always there, and the poor loser probably was sure she worshiped him.
      
      Gosh, I know only too many stories of such women. And yes, their behavior with the clients is always cloyingly sweet, just like on this show. The main goal is always to trick the client into marriage. And that obviously almost never succeeds. Oh, the stories I could tell.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 28, 2015
        
        My comment is a mile longer than the post. 🙂
        
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        Evelina Anville
        
        March 28, 2015
        
        “Hispanic people are as human as you and I. Would you be in love with that old guy? Would I?”
        Well my husband is significantly older than I am and I find him impossibly attractive. So I suppose I don’t find the premise wildly implausible. 🙂 This isn’t to negate your analysis of course.
        
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      2. cliff arroyo
        
        March 28, 2015
        
        “Of course, the (young and very beautiful) client could not have guessed that she would refer to him in Spanish as “this idiot, this shit, this loser, etc.” right in front of him. ”
        
        Poor guy. Did anyone find a way to tell him that no, he wasn’t loved at all and that he was being used as a human ATM?
        
        Did anyone tell her she need a whole lot of therapy before even thinking about being in a relationship with another human being and that she was a toxic poison that would ultimately destroy anything it touched?
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 28, 2015
        
        “Poor guy. Did anyone find a way to tell him that no, he wasn’t loved at all and that he was being used as a human ATM?”
        
        This is just one story. There was a whole group of them doing this.
        
        “Did anyone tell her she need a whole lot of therapy before even thinking about being in a relationship with another human being and that she was a toxic poison that would ultimately destroy anything it touched?”
        
        She and I were great friends once. But after seeing this, I obviously couldn’t hang around any longer. She still tries to reach out and become friends again every once in a while. 😦
        
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Shakti

March 28, 2015

Perhaps they compensate for the gloss of having a gay couple and a couple of non-white characters by making everyone as retrograde as possible? Ed O’Neill (the old guy) is a dinosaur; he starred on Married With Children for many many years.

This is why Roseanne holds up so well for a sitcom on re watch–the characters look like people you’d come across in real life. I’ve never really watched Modern Family in the same way I managed to avoid watching Friends in the 1990s.

.

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susan gilbert

March 28, 2015

Haven’t seen this one, maybe it hasn’t reached the UK yet. I occasionally have to run from the room to avoid encountering ‘everybody loves some jerk called Raymond’ or some such drivel! It is dire.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 28, 2015
  
  Yes, Raymond is hard core crap. 🙂 But unlike Raymond, in this show both the husband and the wife are infantile and bumbling.
  
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mm

March 28, 2015

Modern Family is not a sitcom; it is a live catalog. The entire show revolves around the characters shopping usually for gifts. Whole episodes take place at malls or the American Girl store or involve buying houses. Once an entire plot centered on buying an iPad; that’s right, standing in line to buy an iPad. I predict a similar episode will appear about needing the new Apple watch. Disney/ABC owns a stake in Apple. I am not being cynical. I bought the Le Creuset pots prominently featured on the characters’ stove tops. They are beautiful and useful. I just wish they would put little price tags on everything as the “plots” unfold. It would save me time from looking them up later.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 28, 2015
  
  I didn’t even notice that part, to be honest. I was too fixated on the patriarchal mother issue. I did not think this was something that was even present in the American culture, especially not to the extent of being recognizably comedic.
  
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  1. DWeird
    
    March 28, 2015
    
    Product placement is a fairly prevalent feature across most american shows and movies, I believe. You might be interested in the (pop)documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
    
    It is about a guy trying to finance the movie in question primarily through product placement and how the brand representation requirements of the financial supporters end up shaping the film.
    
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zeppomanx

March 28, 2015

For me the the problem with Modern Family was that it is supposed to be a comedy but I never laughed. And although this particular arrangement of characters may be new for a series, it seemed cliched and stale, at least for me.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 28, 2015
  
  That’s exactly how I feel. Stale is the perfect word to describe it.
  
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J. Otto Pohl

April 1, 2015

I saw a few episodes here in Ghana when my Norwegian housemate got the series. Mainly I watched it for the Vietnamese baby adopted by the gay couple because she looked a lot like my daughter who is still in Kyrgyzstan.

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