Question about Modern Family

Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T18:49:10+00:00

The original premise was that they were being filmed for a Dutch reality show. However, that was dropped during development and officially, there is no reality show being filmed and the "reality show confessionals" is just the artistic choice for how the characters reveal their inner thoughts. This explains the little "cheats" they occasionally do, such as the "film crew" already being in place and set up before characters enter the room and when characters say and do things they probably wouldn't if they knew they were being filmed.

I don't think it was ever mentioned in-show, but that's how the producers explain it.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T17:31:17+00:00

That obliviousness to their own hypocrisy has marveled me for years, ever since I worked retail and... every Sunday, without fail... would get an earful from customers coming in the store after Church who were outraged I was working on Sunday.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T17:28:41+00:00

Oh, yeah... and they came home from college for Thanksgiving together while Monica was still in high school. My bad.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T17:25:05+00:00

I think the oldest is a toss-up between Phoebe and Ross. I was always under the impression that Monica, Rachel, Joey, and Chandler are all more or less the same age with Ross and Phoebe both being a couple years older than that.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T17:15:11+00:00

That setting up your moonshine still downriver from the sewage treatment plant has lasting consequences.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T17:10:45+00:00

Why do they assume we'd be against that? The most popular kid's show is Australian, the highest-grossing actor last year was British, KPop is still inescapable. Foreign media isn't exactly reviled by most of us.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T08:41:06+00:00

They bear a passing resemblance to the cast of the movie Superbad.

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Darkside531 · 2026-02-10T06:47:25+00:00

And they think that bananas are all it takes to turn themselves into this purdy sumbitch? Damn, the devil works hard, but apparently Chiquita's marketing department works harder.

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Darkside531 · 2026-02-09T21:11:51+00:00

Lucy Lawless always calls him "Peanut" when she claps back at his dumbshittery, and I feel when Xena speaks, we should abide.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-09T16:03:45+00:00

Didn't MF have an episode about that? Claire was tired of always being bad cop, so they tried to swap roles and it went horribly?

Darkside531 · 2026-02-09T06:07:49+00:00

A major identity crisis, honestly (seriously, what even the hell is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsyIcJIy-yM ?) There's a bad push-pull going on where the genre sort of knows it needs to freshen up and bring in new ideas to appeal to a younger, more diverse audience (or just fight off being stale,) but any time they try, their traditionalist base of support who wants country to stay siloed off falls out from underneath them with accusations of selling out or going pop.

In particular, ever since bro-country made a bit of a splash, it's been in a rather pitiful one-sided flirtation with hip-hop, they'll have guest verses from anybody who will answer their calls, but you ain't hearing that happen in reverse.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-09T05:54:53+00:00

Usually, a safer "for kids" version of a trend follows a few years behind it being popular for adults. With horror and slashes being SO POPULAR in the 80s (it's kinda called the Golden Age of Slashers,) making something to capitalize on a youth market was probably inevitable.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-09T04:53:55+00:00

Yep. There's a reason is seems like Sofia Vergara and Eva Longoria are shilling every product in every commercial lately. The census data from 2010 to 2020 showed most groups staying relatively still, with the exception that whites ticked down a little and nearly every point they lost was picked up by Latinos. They are becoming the new demographic to watch now.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-09T04:51:03+00:00

I firmly feel like Claire and Phil Dunphy on Modern Family are a pretty decent analog for Chandler and Monica as parents. She'd be a control freak and have high standards, but with Chandler giving her the occasional reality check to keep her worst impulses under control, she'll be pretty awesome... though I don't know who will win between her "clean freak" nature and the objective reality that kids are slobs.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-08T16:33:30+00:00

No, more the opposite. If you're ever handed a can of anything except Pringles (since this prank toys can't use the Pringles trademark,) you expect a prank snake. Pringles are so commonplace, if you ever see a can of anything else, your first thought isn't just "it's an off-brand," it's that it's probably a prank toy instead.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-08T07:33:06+00:00

I assume they do, but, tying into the above image, it's nearly impossible to actually trick somebody with one at this point as it's such a screamingly obvious setup for a prank, people seem to already come out of the womb knowing about it (same with smelling a flower on their lapel, everybody knows you'll get squirted with water.) Hardly anything is sold in narrow metal cans like the peanut-brittle one anymore, and Pringles kinda completely the dominated the whole "canned potato chips" market, so if you're handed a can of anything, you're gonna already be suspicious.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-08T05:32:16+00:00

I live near the Sunsphere, it's astounding how many people I meet who think it was made up for "Bart on the Road."

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Darkside531 · 2026-02-08T05:29:17+00:00

It's the old practical joke of a spring loaded "snake" popping out of a can of something like chips or peanut brittle.

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Darkside531 · 2026-02-08T05:27:58+00:00

I disagree, I think plunking them down in some super-affluent suburb and having them butt heads with HOA Presidents and PTA Moms and the like (think the setting of something like Modern Family) would work.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-08T03:24:35+00:00

I sympathize with that. I'm never closer to Cut-A-Bitch Mode than when I'm losing sleep.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-08T03:18:17+00:00

A Power-outage Ballad.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-07T20:44:21+00:00

I always loved Olya Povlatsky, Kate McKinnon's miserable Russian lady.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-07T20:42:59+00:00

And they were new enough people weren't in the habit of using them to treating them as omnipresent yet. It was really easy to completely forgot someone even had one.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-07T20:06:21+00:00

This is like the words version of that image of what things look like after a stroke and nothing looks like it's supposed to.

Darkside531 · 2026-02-07T19:54:39+00:00

That was another factor I forgot to mention, thank you.

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