After seven seasons, the characters of Modern Family have gotten themselves into some wild, wacky and straight-up weird situations. Sam Brooks collects the best of them.
Modern Family is one of the most successful sitcoms of the current generation of TV. It’s won boatloads of awards, always gets great ratings and has never had a drop in quality, despite a huge ensemble cast of which half have grown from children into teenagers and now adults.
There’s a lot of Modern Family to get through – a whole seven seasons in fact, the latest of which dropped on Lightbox this week. So for those of us who need a wee recap, here’s a rundown of some of the craziest and weirdest things that the characters on Modern Family have done over the past seven years.
Jay (Ed O’Neill)
Has a gross dog butler statue.
Kills his son’s turtle.
Showers with his dog.
Gives a present intended for his dog to his wife’s sister.
Pretends to be in Mexico so he doesn’t have to spend time with his family.
Gloria (Sofia Vergara)
Makes her husband dress up ridiculously because he made a fairly racist assumption about her Colombian culture.
Gives away a neighbour’s dog because it barks too loudly.
Whatever this accent is:
Films her son and his cousin in the bath to punish them for trying to steal her tequila.
Smashes a gift from her husband because she thinks there’s something inside.
Phil (Ty Burrell)
Has a deeply weird/wild and inappropriate crush on Gloria (his wife’s father’s wife).
Steals a neighbour’s bike accidentally to teach his son a lesson.
Assaults a man with perfume in the mall.
Has an emotional attachment to his daughter’s ex-boyfriend immediately upon their break-up.
Lets his son throw a basketball at his head 78 times for a viral video.
Cam (Eric Stonestreet)
Fizbo. Just… Fizbo.
Plays in a band with his niece’s current boyfriend.
Pretends to be Native American to get his daughter into a fancy pre-school.
Somehow directs a high school version of The Phantom of the Opera.
Willing accepts a wedding cake topper made of soap.
Claire (Julie Bowen)
Puts up signs around the neighbourhood in order to make a car stop driving fast.
Goes on a rant against a principal and is handcuffed on school property.
Tries to bribe that same principal to give her son an academic award.
Vandalizes someone’s property to help her husband sell that property back.
Does not appreciate that her husband is one of the most attractive men on the planet (this is more a consistent thing than anything else).
Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson)
Willingly takes care of a stray pigeon.
Gets his sister to tell his husband he is wearing bicycle shorts that are too small for him.
Sets up a flash mob as a ‘pleasant’ surprise to his husband, which sounds like my worst nightmare. (Both the setting up of a flash mob and the witnessing of one.)
Drops a priceless comic book into a spider web. It is, of course, Spider Man.
Tries to destroy a gift his husband’s father gave him for their wedding.
Unfortunately, the kids get into a lot fewer wacky hijinks than the adults, but I did some hunting and found some potential gold:
Luke (Nolan Gould)
Makes a robot out of smoke alarms, for some reason.
Breaks into bat mitzvahs to find a girl he saw in a hotel hallway.
Haley (Sarah Hyland)
Dresses as a sexy Mother Theresa for Halloween.
Get kicked out of college for admitting to the police everything illegal she’s done since she started college.
Goes to get a tattoo with her mother but backs out of it after her mother.
Alex (Ariel Winter)
Finds out her parents want to send her back to volunteer in Africa when she returns… and is surprisingly chill about it?
Asks her mother to join her on a trip to Europe, for some reason that only the powers that be can discern.
Manny (Rico Rodriguez)
Has a mid-life crisis upon turning… eleven.
Gets upset when his cousin wears a tie that matches his pocket square.
Has a thankfully unrequited and brief crush on his cousin.
You can watch all seven seasons of Modern Family on Lightbox right here:
