The Legacy of Modern Family and How It Changed TV Forever

Modern Family came to an end after 11 seasons this Wednesday with its 250th episode but its impact and legacy must never be forgotten. 

“Life is full of change. Some big, some small. I learned a long time ago you can fight it or you can try to make the best of it. And that’s all a little easier if you’ve got people who love you helping you face whatever life throws at you.”

Modern Family came to an end after 11 seasons this Wednesday with its 250th episode but its impact and legacy must never be forgotten.

Modern Family is a show that helped in changing TV forever. The series was groundbreaking for so many reasons, back when the show first aired in 2009, there weren’t a lot of gay couples adopting babies on the screen.

Ed O’Neill’s Jay who was in his early 60s was married to his second wife, Sofia Vergara’s Gloria, a much younger Columbian woman whose son, Manny, was in his early teens. At the center of the show, there was a normal American family as well, known as the Dunphys. Jay’s daughter, Claire played by Julie Bowen who was married to the lovable dork and goofball Phil played by Ty Burell, who had three kids. Jay’s son, Mitchell played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, was living with his partner, Eric Stonestreet’s Cameron and they had just adopted a baby girl from Vietnam.

Right from the pilot, you could tell that Modern Family was offering something way different than anything airing at that time. Even though now it’s normal, it was groundbreaking and revolutionary at that time and the fact that it has since been normalized now is thanks to Modern Family in a major way.

And even with everything it had to offer Modern Family manage to strike a perfect balance between the heartfelt sentimental moments and the funny comic moments. In an interview with E! Online, the series co-creator Chris Lloyd said, “I think people, when they think back in the show will just as much remember having laughed really hard at Phil or Cam or Gloria, but also to have been touched by moments that felt very real to them, and that might be what might make them want to revisit these episodes at some point in their life.”

This blend of diverse characters in a family was something very new at that time and the fact that it worked massively made the fact clear that the audience wanted something new. The show’s staggering ratings (Modern Family averaged around 10 Million Viewers in its first season), and the ravishingly overwhelming reviews from the critics proved that it was a massive hit among the audience as well as the critics, and paved the way for more experimental takes on the genre such as CBS’s Life in Pieces and Fox’s New Girl.

The show started up racking tonnes of awards right from its first season and it even went on to win Outstanding Comedy Series back-to-back for five years straight tieing up Frasier’s record and even racked up huge acting wins. Throughout its 11 seasons, it won a total of 22 Emmys, the only sitcom to have won more Emmys than Modern Family is Cheers. Back in 2011, even Barack Obama declared that this was his family’s favorite show.

The list of the show’s glory and how it impacted the world throughout its entire run is long, but its most impactful aspect will forever be Mitch and Cam tying the knots a year before same-sex marriage was legal in all states. Modern Family was as mainstream of a show there could have ever been, and even averaged 13 Million viewers per week at its peak and every week they made the people of LGBTQ community and couples seem as normal or as absurd or as boring as everybody else out there, which helped in making people be more open or adoptive to it than ever before. The fact that this diversity among people and sexualities on television was received with this kind of overwhelming love is the reason that opened the way for so many shows centered around LGBTQ characters like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Orange is the new Black and many others. Modern Family was a safe place and comfort food to millions of people across the world and it will surely be dearly missed.

Leave the porch light on.