Tuned In

Modern Family Watch: This Is the Sound of My Soul

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ABC

Spoilers for last night’s Modern Family after the jump:

 

* Sssh! Wait—listen for a second. Did you hear that? That’s right… nothing. This time out, an episode of Modern Family ended without a character delivering some funny-but-touching monologue about what we learned in the episode. And it worked just fine—that closing scene of Claire and Phil dancing, to a song that Phil neither remembered nor particularly wanted to hear on his anniversary, was simple and sweet. I harped on Modern Family a while ago for its habit of ending on monologues, and I’ll admit it was a picky quibble—the sort of complaint you make about a show that you have high expectations of. Seven episodes in, I’m glad the show is changing up its game just a bit.

* The show has made a lot of hay out of Phil as the buffoon who tries too hard to be cool and well-liked, so it was good to see him played for once as the guy who gets it right. For all his obsessions and boyish fixations, the essence of Phil (again, not unlike Michael Scott) is that he cares a lot. Which may be annoying at times, but probably does make him the kind of guy you want buying an anniversary present for you. Whereas it fit well that Claire, who (1) seems a bit socially inept (a trait I suspect she inherited from Jay) and (2) presumably, as the former Hot Girl in School, never had to work that hard to impress guys, simply has a blind spot about gift-buying. Phil’s heroic effort to try to cover up her mistake for her sake (even though he really would prefer a yogurt machine) showed us why she’d love him in the first place. And revealing that Claire mistook Spandau Ballet’s “True” for OMD’s “If You Leave” was a perfect detail.

* Speaking of which, I was delighted to see Edward Norton [!] in the role, but who was he channeling? I was picking up equal parts David Brent, Charlie from Lost and Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

* OK, one related nitpick: why has the show decided it’s so important to make its adult characters as young as they are? If I have my math correct from Mitchell and Claire’s ice-dancing flashback, Mitchell is about 31 and Claire a couple years older. I’m assuming the backstory is that Claire got pregnant very early with Hailey (shotgun wedding?), but it’s strange, then, that both the casting and the cultural references fight against that. Certainly “True,” from 1983, could have been playing on the radio in 1991; so could “If You Leave,” from 1985. But that just calls attention to the fact that Julie Bowen, though she can credibly play younger, is 39—and no offense, Ty Burrell (42), but Phil is not a dad in his early 30s. I guess it’s partly testament to the TV rule that all parents of teen kids must have had them at an extremely young age, but when Bowen and Burrell make just as much sense playing their actual ages, it seems a little odd, especially when “their song” is an ’80s callback. (Then again, maybe it’s just the How I Met Your Mother philosophy that ’80s references are always funnier than ’90s ones, even when anachronistic.)

* Mitchell and Cameron’s storyline, meanwhile, was also a keeper, with another guest performance from Elizabeth Banks. It worked not just because the jealous single friend is a common new-parent experience, but because it makes sense that M&C are the kind of couple who probably would have been de facto “parents” to a single friend like Sal even before they had a kid.

* Finally, let’s give it up again for Rico Rodriguez. All comic actors should aspire to be that funny simply sipping a demitasse of espresso.