ABC
“My dad’s not like your dad. There’s nothing deep and dark inside. His hard candy shell is only hiding more candy.”
Because Jay is a central character on Modern Family, we’ve seen a lot of what makes Claire and Mitchell Claire and Mitchell. We haven’t had the same opportunity with Phil, so it was good to see Fred Willard as his dad (whom we saw briefly on videochat earlier in the season) to see something of what makes Phil Phil. The interesting thing is that while his wife Claire is who she is partly in reaction to her dad, Phil is who he is largely in imitation of his dad.
On his blog, Alan Sepinwall makes the argument that Willard is actually a too perfect, too obvious choice to play the elder Dunphy, and I can see that. But I thought it worked here, the reason being that, in this episode, Phil is seeing his own issues reflected in his father; by trying to get his dad to talk about his problems, he encounters–maybe without really knowing it–his own avoidance strategies. Where Julie rebelled against her dad and now finds she needs to be more like him now that she has children, Phil wants to be just like his dad but needs to fight the tendency to turn everything into a joke. In that respect, having Frank’s “problem” be not about his marriage but simply about his dog kind of seemed like a meta-way of avoiding getting too serious, but the character story worked well for me anyway.
As for the subplots, Manny’s horror-movie-induced paranoia was, I thought, a potentially hilarious story that was undercut by the fact that its funniest parts were telegraphed. (Did anyone not know the second Jay took Manny to the movie sight unseen that it would end up being horribly inappropriate?)
But as for the other: Cameron, makeup, drumsticks. Do I really need to say more?
Bonus: Today in “Obscure Musical References in Tuned In Headlines,” feel free to read this post while listening to this James Brown classic, this track by Ultramagnetic MCs or this one from Amy Rigby (“He’s cute / If a middle-aged man can be described as cute”). Very different choices, can’t go wrong either way.