Whenever I look back on
Modern Family’s fourth season, I can’t help but view it as being the show’s
weakest season. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t completely hate season four. It’s
just that while the first three seasons have numerous episodes that I feel like
watching repeatedly, season four doesn’t have nearly as many episodes that I
feel that way about. While I do think that season four is currently the weakest
season of Modern Family, I’ll admit that I found that a fair amount of season
four episodes had really grown on me when I watching the season again on DVD.
Personally, I feel like season five has been a major improvement compared to
season four. Much like the first three seasons, I’ve one again felt like
watching a lot of the season five episodes that aired at this point repeatedly,
and I feel fairly comfortable guessing that when season five has ended, this
will be one of the episodes that I’ll feel like watching numerous times in the
future.
I feel like this episode
really demonstrates one of the things that I’ve always viewed as being one of
the show’s greatest strengths, which would be the fact that the writers handle
the ensemble nature of the show perfectly for the most part. It’s also my
opinion that the cast of Modern Family is the perfect size. There’s enough
characters that give the writers a lot of different combinations to work with
when it comes to pairing characters up for storylines, but the cast doesn’t
have so many series regulars that the actors/characters are constantly being
neglected by the writers, which has always been my main complaint about Once
Upon a Time. All of the storylines in this episode feature some really great
combinations of characters, and all of the storylines were very funny and a lot
of fun to watch.
One of the themes that was
featured in several of the storylines was the fact that by the end of the episode
it was made very clear that a lot of the characters were putting on some kind
of act around other people in this episode. One of the storylines that revolved
around that idea was the whole thing with Cameron, Mitchell, Alex and Manny all
going to a local art gallery together to see a new art exhibit. Towards the
beginning of the episode, Cameron revealed in a couch interview that since he
doesn’t know all that much about art, he had some research on the artist whose
work he believed was currently on display at the gallery. He did this so he
could come across as knowing what he was talking about when they were all at
the art gallery. Unfortunately for Cameron, the exhibit that he had done
research on was only a temporary exhibit and was no longer on display, which
prompted him to try his next idea for how to handle the situation: Touch a
painting and get kicked out of the gallery.
