“A good ending actually needs to be a good beginning,” says Christopher Lloyd.
Family time is over.
The family lives on.
Credit: Bonnie Osborne/ABC
(Flood warnings this time, explained Mitchell.
And a swarm of locusts has been spotted in the flight path.
What part of the Old Testament are we moving to?)
Eric McCandless/ABC
And over in house No.
Life is full of change some big, some small.
At least, thats what helps me sleep at night.
Joe Pugliese for Twentieth Century Fox Television
What was it like to plot and film that final farewell?
Which characters future adventures most intrigued the writers?
And, well,arethey coming back?
Joe Pugliese for Twentieth Century Fox Television
How long have you had this particular ending in mind and were there different versions you considered?
You almost want to set people on new paths.
And that will add a bittersweet quality to the end, but feels fitting because families do morph.
That’s also true to life, that families disperse, but they come back together at various times.
They won’t be living around each other.
And it’s a hopeful thing for Phil and Claire.
And for the kids to know they’re always welcome at home.
Everyone’s always welcome at the Dunphys'.
It seemed a hopeful final image.
You set all these characters on courses for new beginnings.
And the RV trip!
And that’s what makes the series live on.
Which characters story was hardest to tie up and took the longest time to crack?
With Jay and Gloria, would they move to Colombia?
She seems a little bit more driven, career-wise.
Trust me, there was plenty of debate about all of these things.
Phil hasn’t changed that much.
He’s still a realtor.
He’s still teaching.
But he’s also happy to see where his kids are going.
Ty mentioned that it was hard to get through filming the finale, as everyones emotions were maxing out.
He said that real emotions and staged emotions were all jumbled up on camera.
Were there takes that you had to discard because it just got too emotional?
Which scene contains the most blurring of that?
So it naturally brought up a ton of emotion.
And that definitely got to those actors.
And [Gloria saying,] Why is it so hard for us?
[and Jay answering,] Because most people don’t get what we’ve gotten.
Just too much spilled out.
So everybody calmed down and they agreed to try it one more time.
No, we didn’t.
[Laughs] We probably could have enjoyed doing Cam’s version, using the letters of her name.
Who breaks first in the these scenes?
Thats what I figured.
No lack of professionalism.
My back is seizing up!
And that was one that they laughed Ty leading the way but they laughed 15 times.
It took an hour to shoot that scene.
So this one was reminiscent of that.
How much of more of the skating sequence did Jesse and Julie learn?
They didn’t do too much.
So sad for the porch light.
And skating?????
With about five question marks afterwards.
I think it’s the right amount.
They probably would have been game to do more, but you know, it’s also dangerous.
As far as Sal, we just always loved that character.
We would’ve used her more, but she’s a busy woman between her acting and her directing.
She’s phenomenally talented and hilarious, and certainly one of my favorite of our guest actors.
And then she had this little window of opportunity to come do a short scene for that episode.
The Officebroke the fourth wall at the end of its run.
Look, its a valid idea.
Obviously, we started out in our pilot having that person be a character.
And then the more we thought about, we thought, That might take the audience out of it.
Because I thinkThe Officemade you aware that they were actual people much more than we did.
We were just using it as a technique more than a sort of an actual reality.
The light on the porch at the end gave off an optimistic, well-meet-again glow.
And as Phil says to Claire about their kids, They come back.
What was the intention?
The intention of that image was more to make people imagine that the family will reunite.
Now, was the intention to promise that we would literally see these characters again?
Not necessarily, no.
It was much more that these characters will live on in our audience’s mind.
But it was not meant to say, We will absolutely see this family constituted again.
Does that mean we won’t?
It doesn’t mean that.
But if it doesn’t happen, it seemed like a nice little uplifting image for the end.
If a next chapter does come to fruition, in what form do you picture it?
You know, it’s weird.
Had coronavirus come a month earlier, we wouldn’t have even gotten to the end.
We didn’t even get to tell our end.
The networks didn’t do any development; they would love another season of the show.
[Laughs] We could very well be in videoconferencing, figuring out a season 12 ofModern Family.
Obviously that’s not going to happen.
So we have had very preliminary conversations about spinning off some characters.
I mean, that was what we did onFrasierwhen he leftCheersand started his own series.
It could be something like that.
But I don’t want to suggest that that’s a real thing, because it isn’t yet.
It’s a thing we knock around.
I think that probably seems a little more viable than an hour reunion special.
It might be better to leave it in the audience’s imagination.
When the TV history books are written, what do you thinkModern Family’s place will be?
And it helped to move the needle on gay marriage.
I don’t think it would be fair for me to decide what the legacy of the show is.
That’s for others to say.
It wasn’t about their being gay.
And if we made anybodys life easier in any way, it was great.
Mostly we were just trying to be funny or give people something to watch together on a Wednesday night.
When people talk about and revisitModern Familyin the years to come, what do youhopetheyll say?
I hope that they say, Oh, that was a really well-made show.
There was care in the writing of it.
Maybe they get some jokes they didn’t get before or be moved by it in a different way.
