It’s difficult to not get repetitive when you’ve been reviewing a show for as long as I’ve been on the Modern Family beat. When it comes to sitcoms, you tend to see a lot of the same things over and over again. Whether it’s the comedic situations or the attempts at more weighty drama, it all becomes familiar. What that means is that within minutes of an episode starting, it’s usually easy to determine how everything is going to play out.
Every now and then though, an episode surprises you. It takes a truly terrible setup and manages to craft something that’s actually funny and inventive. That’s true of “The Prescott,” which starts out with a premise that’s primed for disaster, and then morphs into a wonderfully choreographed Comedy of Errors that indulges in various misunderstandings and selfish intentions.
The events begin when Alex’s new employer sets her up with a condo in a swanky building that’s home to a few rich, famous people. When the rest of the family takes the tour and find out that they’re not allowed to just walk around and see everything from the pool to the screening room by themselves, they all individually decide to steal Alex’s resident code and gain access to everything on their own. They each have their own plans, like Cam and Mitchell hoping to run into David and Victoria Beckham, Claire wanting to get her hair colored by a popular stylist who Gloria is enemies with, and Phil hoping to secure a spot at an exclusive restaurant so that he can snag a review for his up-and-coming food blog.
When you read all of that, it sounds abysmal. It sounds like every character is going to embrace their worst impulses, which will lead to a bunch of jokes that don’t land. The show has certainly been down that road before. But “The Prescott” is different. Sure, everyone is being selfish and unbearable, but there’s a larger goal here. The entire episode is played like a Comedy of Errors, where one misunderstanding leads to another, until everything is going off the rails.
It’s surprisingly delightful to watch, perhaps because “The Prescott” feels removed from the season’s rather lackluster storytelling. This final season of Modern Family hasn’t had any narrative throughline anchoring the stories, and that’s resulted in a lot of episodes that feel like meaningless filler. “The Prescott” could be defined as filler too, because it’s not furthering any plots, but it’s really not aiming to. Instead, it’s trying to be a standalone comedic episode filled with ludicrous gags and setpieces, and on that level it succeeds.
There’s nothing all that unique here, but the formula works. As everyone comes back to the building and uses Alex’s code to try and get what they want, a chain reaction happens. One misunderstanding leads to another, and suddenly everyone is further from where they started. Higgins, the eager-to-please concierge played by Stephen Merchant—who you may remember as the same butler that worked in a Las Vegas hotel from an episode earlier in the show’s run—acts as the agent of chaos, the unknowing actor in the misfortunes of everyone else.
As Higgins tries his best to direct these “residents” and fulfill their need, he leads them into awkward situations. Phil ends up thinking Claire has set him up with Gloria for one wild night. Cam and Mitchell feud over their attempts to meet the Beckhams, and rope Higgins into a near-sexual encounter that’s not intended. Luke and Manny’s attempts at meeting older women only lead to them meeting David Beckham and Courtney Cox by accident, and Jay spends most of the episode trying to track down his new online nemesis, the Foodie in a Hoodie, who just so happens to be Phil.
Everything comes together wonderfully, in the way a Comedy of Errors should. Phil’s attempts at securing a slider for review on his food blog is misconstrued as an attempt to get Gloria alone, who earlier struggled to overcome her fear of slides. Claire, after a change in hair color, is confused for Victoria Beckham when Higgins isn’t wearing his glasses. Luke and Manny make a lot of “brunette and blonde” mistakes. This isn’t Tati’s Playtime or anything, but it’s a wonderful bit of layered, physical, situational comedy that works well as a standalone episode.
Stray observations
- I love that at the beginning of the episode, Phil recognizes that while the family considers themselves to be nice, they sure have a lot of rivals.
- I’d watch a limited series that’s largely Courtney Cox insulting David Beckham.
- “I’ll need a bib; I can make a mess” is one of the more hilarious/disgusting misconstrued lines of the episode.
28 Comments
Modern Family Maybe when the show ends the writers can help 2020.
They aren’t miracle workers!
Maybe I just missed it somewhere in the review, but I can’t believe you didn’t mention that this is essentially a spiritual and almost literal sequel to the Las Vegas episode with Higgins(Merchant) you mentioned. That was also a Frasier-level comedy of errors.
I eventually bailed on this show, but that Las Vegas ep was def by far the best episode I watched before stopping. Is this one even close to that? Also holy shit, I didn’t think it’d been so long since I’d watched, but I didn’t recognize Luke up in the header image at all.
It comes close somewhat, but the Las Vegas one is still ahead by quite a bit IMO. This one feels a bit overstuffed thanks to some extra players in the mix, so the setup for multiple misunderstandings feel too rapid sometimes.
Takes a bit longer to get rolling. Worth the time. Still no Fizbo, but solid for a show that seems to have given up a long time ago.
The show’s done this format a few times, though, right? Wasn’t there also a Thanksgiving episode like this a few years back?
Yeah, a farce/comedy of errors is actually oft-used in sitcoms, though for Modern Family it’s rarely on the level of intricacies seen in this episode or Las Vegas, but they’ve used the format on other occasions. But this one is clearly a callback to the Vegas one.
And the Australia episode?
aside from the almost identical plot and setting of the Las Vegas episode, i absolutely loved this episode and could not stop laughing at events that were foreshadowed.
Noises Off!! The sitcom.
I laughed when Luke begrudgingly accepted that he’d have to do it with David Beckam or “the dude”.
Once again, I’m surprised there was no mention of Luke’s flirtation with bisexuality…this is the second episode I’ve seen this season in which Luke finds himself in a questionably romantic scenario with a dude, and he has absolutely no qualms about it. I’m all for it, and find it refreshing that it is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner on the show. No other character has questioned it at all–or maybe they just haven’t picked up on it?
It may be a stretch to say he has absolutely no qualms, but I agree that Luke’s emerging bisexuality is a thing and that they should absolutely do something with it.Here’s a link to the earlier episode.
Luke is into 40-something women, but is willing to have sex with men if the opportunity presents itself. That’s a character development you couldn’t have predicted in season… say, 6.
This is the most I’ve laughed at a Modern Family episode in a while, maybe because it stars Stephen Merchant or perchance it could be because of Stephen Merchant but we’ll never know.
Hmmm … I don’t know about you but for me it was definitely Stephen Merchant.
The willingness with which he threw himself into and then withdrew from the threesome with Cam and Mitch was hilarious. Just another part of the job.
Someone commented after Sunday’s unpleasantness that, when it came to the team of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the latter had always been the funny one all the time. Tonight’s episode pretty much confirmed that. Too bad the MF producers didn’t use him more often and save us from being over-Mannied.
Sure, everyone is being selfish and unbearable, but there’s a larger goal here.
~ The AV Club
Hm, I’ve always found comedies of errors annoying – they tend to be ridiculously contrived, pushing suspension of disbelief way past breaking, requiring way too convoluted events and often characters acting substantially stupider or at least more out of character than they normally do. But this show has do blatantly turned its characters into story tools I guess it’s in fitting with their mechanical set of behaviors. It’s just a shame that a show that had a decade to develop its characters has instead turned them into absurd story bots.
When did Gabriel Iglesias take over the role of Manny?
Once again, poor Alex gets the short end of the stick. It’s getting tiring watching her efforts to make her life sucessful get undermined – this week by her own family trying (inadvertently, to a degree – they knew if they were in the building without permission Alex could find herself evicted) to get her in trouble and kicked out of her apartment.(Not to mention, as far as show structure goes, she barely appeared in an episode set in her own new apartment building – why didn’t she get a story of her own?)
I hope that, in the end, we find out Alex is the long lost daughter of a much kinder family. And then we can see her reuniting with them and they actually are proud of her.
I’m not even a little surprised that Manny is a movie-talker. I do like that this season’s episodes are letting us see that other characters also think he’s the worst.
Wow – haven’t watched this show in many many years. Shockingly unimpressive – compared to Schitt’s Creek, One Day at a Time, New Girl, The Good Place, Mom, among others. Who likes this nonsense? Apparently a lot of you. Major observation is that the males are given far more leeway to grow older and larger while the women —even Alex, must starve and shrink.
This is 100% one of the reasons I stopped watching. It was a crappy copy of not only the Vegas episode (even using Higgins!!), but it basically rehashed the premise from an old episode of “Mad About You”The episode when everyone pretends to be Jamie is a far funnier episode. And it was far more believable. In the 90s, I can see not being questioned. But in 2020, the computers at a place full of celebrities doesn’t track a resident number being used in several places at the same time???? Come on!And stop pretending that Manny has any sex appeal. He doesn’t even have “he’s so kind” or “he’s so funny” going for him.
OF COURSE Manny is the type of guy who wears a black t-shirt in the hot tub.