The family gathers at the home of the patriarch. Bitterness is in the air. The son-in-law is wounded. He’s suffered another in a series of emotional and physical assaults from the patriarch. The patriarch is firm; the assault was simply the younger man’s fault, he insists. His daughter finally coaxes an eye-rolling apology from him. The peace is uneasy, and will be broken again soon. Probably next week at 9pm Eastern/8pm Central.
I really wanted to like Modern Family. The humor was right in my wheelhouse. The acting and writing were top notch, justly deserving of the awards presented them. I guffawed and cringed as the Pritchett family collided with one another, but after about six or seven episodes, I was feeling something missing. Something wasn’t satisfying about the show.
It wasn’t the humor. The setups and payoffs and the jokes in between had far more hits than misses, especially when compared to your average comedy that isn’t on NBC’s Thursday schedule. It wasn’t the content. I realized that the inclusion of issues of race, class, and sexuality were designed to push the conservative limits of what a family comedy could be, and yet the show steadfastly avoided sensationalism.
During a walk to our local coffee shop, my wife and I worked to unpack our dissatisfaction. We thought about the other comedies we loved, and found they were so closely aligned with Modern Family that they show up in the recommended shows navigation bar on Hulu. We moved on to the dramas that we loved, too. And then we began to talk about stories as a whole. That’s when we found it.
It was the conclusions; at the end of each episode, the family would overcome the hijinks that came before to affirm that they were, after all, one big family. Heartwarming, right? But as we thought more about it, we realized that these codas came without any sacrifice. If a character, like the patriarch Jay in the episode described above, had wronged another character, the reconciliation was cheap. Unwilling to change or compromise after semi-deliberately flying a model airplane into his son-in-law’s face, it’s only when he’s backed into a corner by the rest of the family that he apologizes.
If this were real life, this wouldn’t be quite so funny. And before this comes off as moralistic finger-waving, I’ll be the first to admit that it was funny as hell. But it’s weak. It’s empty. And it’s symptomatic of a deeper contrast in the narrative goals we see around us.
Comedy is about resolving conflict, just as drama is. The roads that each genre takes are well-worn, but they want to end up in the same place, with resolution. Whether it’s the Bluth family trying to find money in the banana stand or Andy escaping Shawshank, the narrative is only resolved when the problem is solved.
Both comedy and drama are drawn to flawed heroes, who essentially stack the deck against the viewer, making us sometimes wonder how we’re rooting for this messed up individual to triumph. An unmarred protagonist is boring, too predictable. Of course Batman is going to beat the mugger: he’s freaking Batman. It’s only when he’s a tortured hero faced with a villain moving like a force of nature that the narrative really grabs us.
So as the narrative moves toward the conclusion, the resolution we crave must come at a cost. A character must change or die (or at least continue to suffer perpetual comic indignities), and ultimately, everything comes to a head. Jack Donaghy humiliates himself on Liz Lemon’s behalf. The couple in every romantic comedy ever overcomes their confusion and turns to one another, confessing their previous wrong-headedness. In a word: redemption.
There it was. We were missing the redemption. Reconciliation without change isn’t peace, it’s a truce. We crave narratives that center around redemption, particularly if we ourselves have been redeemed. It wasn’t about the gay couple or the meanness without consequence. It was that no one felt the need to change, to sacrifice for one another. And the narrative let them have their cake and eat it too.
Narratives need not reach a point of conversion to exhibit a redemptive-driven narrative. Consider The Wire: this chronicle of both sides of the drug trade in urban Baltimore was relentless, almost cruelly dark. Beloved characters died, seemingly without reason. There was no happy ending. Yet the very bleakness was the message: this was creation, groaning for redemption and not getting it.
Nor do the characters need to be motivated by admirable motives. Michael Bluth, the only competent member of the selfish, dunderheaded Bluth family, kept the family together primarily so that he could eventually jettison them all collectively and move on with his life without them. Yet he (and the other Bluths) made many sacrifices for one another and for the good of the family.
Ultimately, the central narrative that replaces redemption on Modern Family is a sort of wan acceptance, where everyone is happiest when no one has to change, but can still bear to be around each other anyway. It’s going along to get along, elevated to an ethos. But tolerance as a narrative driver fails. It’s great for a serialized narrative like a tv show precisely because its resolution is short-lived, allowing the conflict that had simmered to boil again just seven days later, but it’s not real or relatable. The characters may be familiar, but real people strive for real compromise or at least resort to real abandonment.
I gave up watching after that conversation with my wife. We don’t know any families like that. Even the most messed-up families we know, the ones torn apart and yet inexplicably together, don’t wound each other deeply, genuinely dislike one another, and still think that they can be a happy family without having to change any of these behaviors or attitudes, except for the briefest of moments.
Stories are engaging because we see ourselves in them. We love office comedies because we work with those people. We watch white-knuckle cop thrillers because we hope our own police force were that sharp (and good-looking). But a family who is spiteful and bitter for twenty-nine minutes and unified for thirty seconds isn’t anything we’ve ever seen.
The fact that the fictional family of Modern Family does get along is admirable. They are definitely committed to each other. The individual family units and couples do love each other, and that is commendable. But there is no inter-family love to go along with the intra-family love. Just as love without commitment could rightly be classified as infatuation or less, commitment without love is as emotionally compelling as a cell phone contract. Commitment and love together provide stories that reach our souls, not just our funny bones.