“Not in My House” wonderfully demonstrates my favorite thing about Modern Family, which is the way the show combines the completely real with the utterly absurd. It’s a tenuous balance, but the show is yet to dip so far into the absurd as to lose its sense of reality.
The realistic core of the episode revolved around was the search for who checked out porn and who read Haley’s diary at the Dunphy household. The porn thing isn’t particularly clever, but it’s a good plotline nonetheless as it’s so universal. After all, what do you do when you detect that one of your children is looking at porn? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I don’t have any children yet and I’d really like to know for future reference.
Of course, it’s Michael Sc—err… Phil Dunphy who opened the porn and is unwilling to admit to this, so when his wife jumps to the conclusion that youngest son Luke was checking it out, he runs with it. Likewise, Haley assumes that it was her sister Alex who opened her journal, which isn’t nearly as entertaining but nonetheless combines at the end of the episode to reach a wonderful monologue where Luke explains that he was the one reading Haley’s journal while his mother assumes he’s talking about the pornography.
On the complete other end of the spectrum is Jay and his newfound dog butler statue, which his wife Gloria has an irrational dislike for. The main idea that one member of a couple likes an object the other abhors isn’t too out there, but the dog butler is, and where this plotline goes with Gloria deciding that her husband for some reason loves the dog more than her is wonderfully over-the-top. The episode’s funniest moment arrives when Jay stands under a wedding arch with the dog and his wife is utterly convinced (sort of) that they’re getting married.
There was only one link between the show’s three segments this week, which is something that I’m never particularly happy about (cross-cutting between them seems pointless to me if there’s no connection), but it was a good one. Mitchell and Cameron are headed to a puppet show when, for reasons that remain unclear to me, their gardener comes in an decides to avoid his wedding. Their plotline focuses on how Cam is too giving, and Mitchell briefly consults his dad about this, but that becomes somewhat peripheral when a full-on Spanish-speaking wedding breaks out in their living room.
That the Dunphy family’s conflicts in no way have anything to do with everyone else’s is my only real knock against the episode. It was also one of the more facile ones the series has done, without too much really happening in any of the relationships, but that certainly didn’t hurt the show’s humor. Here’s hoping that the dog butler sticks around as another running joke in one the few shows that can successfully pull those off.
Stray Observations:
“If we don’t handle this right, Luke may have an unhealthy attitude towards sex … or agro-business.”
Unlike Goria, I love the dog butler. “He’s a dog, and a butler. I mean, who couldn’t love him?” Indeed! I particularly dig his monocle.
The marionettes sound like real jerks. So weird.
“Breast are like the scary mystical things that he’s drawn to, like Frodo to Mordor.”
12 episodes in and that step is still broken.
“A bird fell out of a tree and he fed it with an eye-dropper for a month.”
Luke’s “I don’t mean for anyone to fight” comment is very sweet and a different side of him than we usually get.
“Some parts were funny, and some parts just seemed crazy.”