This final season of Modern Family has mostly done a bad job of dealing with the passage of time. For a show about to bow out, it’s failed to make anything feel significant or life-changing. It’s a strange thing; plenty of other recent sitcoms, like The Big Bang Theory, have managed to craft focused, narrative-driven final seasons, but Modern Family has spent most of this season rolling out familiar episodes that don’t connect to any larger story.
With that said, “Spuds” is surprisingly delightful. It doesn’t quite get everything back on track in terms of an overarching narrative, but it does finally begin to give the back half of this season a much-needed sense of direction. “Spuds” is a pseudo-clip show. It’s peppered with scenes from older episodes, but it also isn’t overwhelmed by them. It blends the current stories with memories from season’s past to create something different and new. It’s a very welcome surprise.
The catalyst for the clip show is everyone convening at a restaurant called Spuds, a local favorite that’ll soon be closing its doors. It’s a complete accident that much of the family ends up there. Cam and Mitchell are there to chaperone Lily’s first date; Phil and Claire show up with Haley and Dylan because they want to treat them to a dinner away from the anxieties of parenting; and Gloria, Jay, and Joe come through after a school play that everyone else ditched.
It’s the kind of setup that usually devolves into chaotic comedy, but this time around things are different. Sure, there’s some stale jokes here and there, but for the most part “Spuds” is interested in exploring the passage of time, and how this family has grown over the years. If that sounds like something this final season should have been grappling with all along, you’re not wrong. Despite Haley and Dylan creating a new generation of this family, the show has failed to dig into some of the more obvious but fruitful themes that come with aging, parenthood, and the idea of everyone growing up.
Even if “Spuds” doesn’t change everything about this final season, it’s a wonderfully emotional half hour that gets into the heads of these characters in a way that feels meaningful. It grapples with the dynamic of this family in a way that hasn’t been done all season. There’s finally a sense that things are changing, and that’s a good thing.
For the most part, the changes are predictable but moving. Phil is holding on to his father’s RV in the hopes that he can have his own memories with it, and Claire, realizing that her children are all about to be out of the house, comes around to the idea of travelling around with Phil and shaping this next stage of their life. Jay, high on meds for back pain, muses on the rapid passage of time, and how every kid you have is seemingly the one who will stick around and keep you in that stage of your life forever, only to then join everyone else in becoming an adult and building their own lives; a bittersweet pill indeed. Haley and Dylan have inherited the worries of generations past, a passing of the torch when it comes to fretting about how you might mess up your kids and be terrible parents.
There’s a cycle here, and as much as that cycle is exhausting and terrifying and a whole lot of work, it’s also immensely rewarding. So, when Mitchell tells Cam that he didn’t get the head coaching job in Missouri he was hoping for, it looks like life is about to take another unexpected turn. And it does. Cam gets a call from their old adoption agency. The agency, transferring all the files to a new system, accidentally reactivated their file, and a family has chosen them as potential parents for the child they’re putting up for adoption.
The two men hem and haw, playing coy about what they really feel. They watch Lily, who’s gone from awkward to ecstatic when it comes to romance, get an innocent cone of ice cream with her date, and inwardly contemplate how she’s growing up, crossing that threshold that puts her at a distance from her parents. Maybe this is the time to go back, to start the cycle again, and have another baby. It’s a truly beautiful swerve. After weeks of setting up Cam taking this job and the family being split up, this is a moment that lands with real emotion.
Stray observations
- I’m not totally willing to accept that Cam didn’t get the job. It doesn’t feel official until he gets the call. Even if the show backtracks for a bit and gives Cam some moments of hesitation, I think the rawness of this episode still hits home.
- “An au pair. That’s two nannies, right?”
- “We’re aiming a little higher than Luke.”
- Jay to Dylan: “Sometimes you can just ride out a pause, buddy.”
16 Comments
This was weirdly structured. I can’t think of another sitcom episode that was about 1/3 clip show and 2/3 original stories. Still, there were some solid laughs (I liked their inability to remember Dylan correctly) and the final scene between Cam and Mitchell was nicely acted by both of them.
There was an episode of Scrubs in which they did exactly this – complete with backing track for each montage! In fact the whole episode is based around the fact that they’re all bored and thinking about the past. At one point J.D. even makes a point of saying “I keep replaying them in my head like some clip show from a bad sitcom, too lazy to come up with a fresh story… ” Cleverly written and excruciatingly honest! Episode is called ‘My Night to Remember’. This MF episode was well conceived, but too little and too late. I hate what they’ve done to Hayley’s character over past couple of seasons and Cam seems not to have grown up in eleven seasons. Ehhh, who cares anymore – nice review though, sorry I found you guys so late!
The final scene I think made the episode. It went from a “watch it to watch it episode” to I enjoyed that episode.
Lily’s first date? I don’t watch the show anymore, but still follow along the recaps but did I miss some time skips? Isn’t she like not quite 12? Its the eleventh season and she was 6 months old when she was adopted (I think).
Yeah she’s probably like 11-12 in the show. It was a pre-teen “date”
the actress who plays Lily, Aubrey Anderson Emmons was 12 when this was filmed
Honestly, if you were to ask the writers of the show how old she was, you’d get a range.
Lily’s first date? I don’t watch the show anymore, but still follow along the recap sometimes but did I miss some time skips? Isn’t she like not quite 12? Its the eleventh season and she was 6 months old when she was adopted (I think).
The writing in this episode feels like a step up from usual.Lily’s date looked like Joe’s age, though. That was weird.
That is what happens in middle school. The girls go through puberty and leave the guys in the dust.
I fell off this show HARD, but it was great while it lasted. The SO and I still quote things such as “Jay, what parrot? Jay? JAAAAAAY!”
Cam gets a call from their old adoption agency. The agency, transferring all the files to a new system, accidentally reactivated their file, and a family has chosen them as potential parents for the child they’re putting up for adoption.
It would have been better if, due to a different screw up, the adoption agency came to their door saying they’d found parents for Lily, and she was all “Thank God!”
How can you leave out the best line:“To this day, Haley won’t let me…. say their names.”
It was a decent episode. One part I did like was the flashback to Haley’s breakup with her first serious boyfriend only to realize that was Dylan and everything came full circle.I’ll be honest, I don’t really watch every ep of this and am basically dead-ending this but was there any explanation of what Luke and Alex were up to? At least Luke appeared in some flashbacks but I think Alex was completely missing.
Each of the kid actors skipped several episodes during the last season; Manny and Haley were both gone for long stretches, too. I assume it was a cost-cutting measure.
I found your recap of the show interesting. I too have been feeling a bit let down in some of the episodes by this last season but to say TBBT (which I loved until its last season) was better than Modern Family I think you have this wrong. At Thanksgiving or was it Christmas ? they all tried to say where they will be headed in life. Not my choice for any of them but a thought and a good segue way into later shows ie: Paris, this SPUD episode. So slowly but surely they truly are wrapping it up. I am also not totally convinced this is their last season. Maybe a letter writing campaign although seeing the little interest of the group of people writing about the show I fear I would be the one and only. (LOL) Also a huge fan of THE MIDDLE now in my opinion they did one of the best last episodes in modern history of TV. So funny and spot on. Made me want them all back and do episodes of them in those later life characters. Just Saying!