Modern Family, take two!
What I love most about the second season of good shows is that everyone in the cast and crew get through that initiation period of the first season. In season one, the characters are trying to get established, the actors are trying to find their roles in each personality and the flow to the writing goes from erratic to smooth. By the time the second season of a show starts everyone knows what they need to do and how they need to do it. Thus, everything is suppose to get better. It’s like a superhero film where the first film is there to establish the origins and form the characters, and then the second film is pretty much a ‘free-for-all’ for creativity.
With that said, the free-for-all was definitely turned to 11 on the comedy scale for Modern Family in its second season.
The first episode, The Old Wagon, pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the season. The show starts with Phil making the tough decision to sell the family’s old station wagon. The family gets together to clean the wagon out and soon realizes that the memories actually stored inside the wagon make the car too emotionally valuable for the family to get rid of it. To recapture its glory, the family ends up going out to a look-out point to eat, and regretfully they start reliving all the memories they created with it. I don’t want to give it away, but it’s a beautiful collage of failure. To add to this episode’s comedy, Cameron and Mitchell ask for Jay’s help to build a princess fort for Lily, only to find out that Mitchell is awful at building (something he won’t admit). Both stories really run their own course, and then come back together beautifully into one moral of how people should let some things go. Quite frankly, this is the brilliance of the show. The creators can take completely separate situations, create their own mini-comedies out of them and then bring them back together at the end, as if were meant to be together from the beginning.
This is a perfect example of how creative you can get with a second season of a show. No worries on characters, or concerns over if the audience understands the family; it’s already all established in the first season. So episodes like The Old Wagon can be created without much thought into anything else but the comedy.
As the season progresses, the stories become more insane, but mostly all of them contain some very sturdy substance underneath. For example, you get an episode called Halloween (guess what that is about) that surrounds and focuses on Claire’s desire to make the holiday her own. In this episode you get the insanity of Halloween night and an enormous plan that requires the cooperation of the entire family. Of course with any good comedy, nothing goes right in whatever original plan was established. You have Jay and Gloria fighting over Gloria’s, at times, less than inaudible English. Cameron is fighting with Mitchell about why he hates Halloween (you get a sad, but funny backstory with that). You also get the two Dunphy girls dying to be anywhere else than serving their mom’s Halloween plans. All of these are tiny little storylines that are hilarious, but at the end of it all the main storyline is Claire holding on and excelling at this one Halloween night, and finally solidifying the holiday event as her own. Funny stuff that has some solid substance to it.
As the season progresses, the stories just follow the same upward swing… mostly.
There are a couple of episodes where things didn’t turn out nearly as good as the rest of the season. One example is Dance Dance Revelation. This episode started out slow, as Luke and Manny are preparing for their first school dance. Then the episode shifts gears and focuses on Claire and Gloria preparing for the dance (getting decorations together, tables, etc). Then things go from dull to way too serious, as Claire and Gloria have it out. Up to this point, the show had never fully addressed Claire’s feelings towards Gloria (and vice versa), rather it’s always playfully hinted at it. The show never fully digs its way out of this ‘serious’ hole. Even the funny side story of Cameron and Mitchell dealing with Lily’s new biting habits can’t help or bring more ‘funny’ to the episode. It was a very odd episode that simply didn’t fit the rest of the season. There were only about two episodes in the entire season like this, so they weren’t enough to hurt the overall season.
With that said, in the end the entire second season of Modern Family really set new boundaries on how far the show can go and how much humor it can produce. I will be anxious to see how the third season rolls out and what they can do to make the show better. As it stands, you should welcome this season to the Blu-ray shelf with the first.
Speaking of Blu-ray, the quality of the visuals and audio was definitely high. The video never had graininess in it, even in some of the poorly lit episodes (like when Phil and Claire spend some time in a dark theater(s)). There is no color banding or artifacts in the season. While the video doesn’t take up the entire screen (you gotta love odd aspect ratios like 1:78:1), it does bring out a lot of whites, blacks, reds, yellows and pretty much any color on the spectrum quite beautifully. Even the green and grays look sharp on this release.
As for the audio, it’s great and there’s plenty to enjoy audibly. The opening music is too damn catchy, but it sounds great in 5.1 DTS-HD. You get very clean, crisp and clear music and audio with this Modern Family release.
As for the features, there’s plenty to be happy about. You get a nice featurette called Modern Family Holidays (won’t ruin that one for you), a wonderful gag reel, a solid featurette on Mitch’s Flash Mob and various other little things to make the special features worth the price of admission. The only issue I have about this portion of the Blu-ray is the Oprah feature. It just seemed oddly out of place in comparison to everything else. You get to see a day where Oprah’s camera crews follow the actors around. The feature is only about five minutes in length, but it’s terribly pointless.
Anyway… ONTO THE SUMMARY!