Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: November 25, 2009
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Modern Family, “Fizbo” (season 1, episode 9). [Stream on Amazon Video.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It’s interesting to write about Modern Family from the perspective of 2016, EIGHT seasons into that show’s reign. Over those eight seasons, the show won five Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series, a run of nearly unprecedented success that — coupled with the show’s tendencies towards safe, samey comedy in an age where angry and edgy are what gets respect — made nearly everybody who writes about television hate it. Modern Family has become our new Everybody Loves Raymond; you can’t argue with its success, but too many of your parents watch it for it to be in any way cool.
Thinking back to the fall 2009 TV season, then, is an interesting time-machine ride. By a wide margin, the two sensations of that fall were Modern Family and Glee, both shows that got a lot of attention by being nothing like what was on TV at the time. With Glee, that’s self-evident. There’s still not anything on TV that matches what Glee did, for good or bad. Modern Family, on the other hand, was at the forefront of a commitment to diversity that TV (and the ABC network in particular) was finally going to begin taking seriously. That Modern Family‘s triptych of households included a gay couple and their adopted baby daughter did feel revolutionary only one year removed from Prop 8 passing in California. That we’ve come so far so quickly (fingers crossed it stays that way) meant many good things for real life and for TV, but it couldn’t help but leave Modern Family looking like a bit or a relic.
That said, an episode like “Fizbo,” from the show’s first season, is still a look back into what that show did best in its earliest incarnation. This was the episode that Eric Stonestreet submitted for Emmy consideration — he’d win the Emmy that year, against competition from his own show — and was generally regarded as the best of season 1.
That kicker with the clock is a GOOD BIT. The thing about a show like Modern Family is that it’s strong on fundamentals. Timing and character and precision. It’s good enough that it can make you laugh in spite of yourself. Eric Stonestreet finds about 80 different angles to make the clown thing funny, and that’s on top of how ridiculous/perfect he looks in the makeup. Whoever did the makeup design deserves about sixteen Emmys. It’s the exact right tone to give Fizbo: unnerving but not scary; exuberant but not happy; notes of melancholy without overdoing it. He’s not a sad clown. He’s not a scary clown. He’s not a happy clown. He just … deadpan. It’s perfect.
