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Modern Family Watch: Love, (North and South) American-Style

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ABC

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

Permit me to play The Old Man for a minute. Many of you readers are probably too young to remember Love, American Style. (Even I should be too young to remember it, but as a youngest child I was exposed to a lot of age-inappropriate TV as a kid, which is probably why I am a TV critic.) It was an anthology show in the ’70s that collected romantic-comedy stories, broadly defined. Among other things it was known for airing a very early prototype of Happy Days before it became a series:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNHuI0Pw0m8]

It was an unusual thing at the time, and would be an even more unusual one today. Sketch shows aside, scripted comedy anthologies aren’t really done on TV now. The closest we’ve come lately are sitcoms with separate individual storylines, like Bravo’s late, underappreciated Significant Others, about various couples in therapy, and that didn’t last very long.

What Modern Family has become, interestingly, is a kind of part-time, back-door comedy anthology. Having introduced its characters as part of a connected family (after a pilot that kept them separate until the end as a twist), it’s now free to do episodes like last night’s, which are essentially three entirely separate mini-episodes in one.

I know some of my colleagues, like Alan Sepinwall, have issues with the episodes that keep the three families separate, but I like the mix. For starters, I think it would quickly seem forced if each episode found a way to bring some or all of the separate families together. But second, because we have seen these characters often enough to know the larger family’s dynamics, they’re never really separate; our background knowledge of, say, Jay’s need to be the tough guy informs Mitchell’s forcing himself to be the bad cop to Cameron’s good cop (and his discomfort with it even as he knows it’s necessary).

Even without the framing device of the younger kids talking about their parents (or the callback to the hot firefighters in separate plots), the show has enough unity to seem greater than the sum of its parts, but being able to send each family unit solo gives the show more options.

But speaking of the kids’ interviews, they showed how the writers know the characters well enough to supply the perfect what-do-your-parents-tell-you line for each: “That’s too much cologne,” “That’s how girls end up dead.” (And the delayed payoff of the “Don’t talk black to me” line was brilliant.) While I thought Benjamin Bratt was a little romantic-Latin-obvious as Manny’s dad, Jay’s falling into the role of disappointed child was nicely played, and the Ferberization story was another example of Cam and Mitchell enabling to make a pretty familiar story of parenting seem fresher.

That’s what I think, anyway. What say you? Talk black to me! And enjoy this clip from Love, American Style: