ABC, May 18, 2011, 10 PM (ET) In an episode entitled “See You Next Fall,” “Modern Family” saluted Alex Dunphy’s graduation (Ariel Winter). Alex is graduating from junior high school and, as Manny (Rico Rodriguez) says to Luke (Nolan Gould), “Do you realize, in just two years we’ll be graduating?” At the moment, Luke is staring at a beach ball floating in the pool and says, “I think I’m moving it with my mind.” Manny—barely missing a beat—says, “Well, at least I will.”
The episode was the perfect blend of wit and slapstick. It was written by Danny Zuker (prominent in the credits each week) and directed by Steven Levitan, one of the series’ creators. Top notch attention, in other words, to this episode.
The opening laughs are centered on Cam’s (Eric Stonestreet) fall into the backyard child’s pool. Mitchell (Jesse Tyler-Ferguson) laughs and Cam is offended. Once they join the rest of the family at Jay and Gloria’s for a pre-graduation party, his iritation is simply intensified when he accidentally walks into both a sliding glass door and the screen door. When the entire group laughs, Cameron, in high dudgeon, says, “Cruelty is genetic.” There is also concern over Jay’s drooping eyelid, which he is reluctant to admit occurred when he had Botox. Cam blurts out, “What were you thinking? You’re a veteran!”
As is foreshadowed during Jay’s attempts to get his gate to automatically rise, the entire graduation group is stuck behind the uncooperative gated fence. Gloria’s solution is to throw a bicycle built for two over the fence, quickly followed by Claire (Julie Bowen) and Phil (Ty Burrell). They set off for their daughter’s valedictorian address on the bicycle-built-for-two, which promptly suffers a broken chain. There is already concern among the family that Alex’s speech, which is essentially one long complaint about her treatment by her fellow classmates, will be inappropriate and make her a social pariah. The good advice from older sister Haley (Sarah Hyland) is that Alex simply mouth the words to a mindless pop song. As the line in the script has it: “It’s a graduation…a celebration of being done with thinking!”
The climax of the episode is the arrival of Phil and Claire at the graduation ceremony. They literally fall down the hill outside the ceremony, causing Cam to laugh. The lines were great in the episode. One of my personal favorites was Luke’s unspoken solution to the “we’re-stuck-behind-the-gate” problem when Phil says (with Luke’s solution still unspoken), “We don’t have time to build a rocket.”
A great episode of the best sitcom series currently on the air.