Mature Themes

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I once met a television producer who asked me if I had any ideas for a movie. We connected on the cramped set of a new reality-style sitcom he was producing for ABC called Modern Family. The director of the pilot introduced us as “two people who should really get to know one another” and praised us both for our work with him in the past. Modern Family is about the short-range social economy of a “non-traditional” family in southern California that remains close despite a variety of cultural interventions. Its politics are asymmetrical: the emphasis placed on the non-traditional in the family unit describes a program of normalization disguised as difference, making the show’s central focus the slapstick of a self-subverting desire in queerness to replicate that structure more perfectly. Difference is translated into the reenforcing dogma of “family values,” renewed (and concealed) by a “progressive” inclusion of gays and immigrants into its image of itself. It is always sunny and the comedy fairly tame, though occasionally the show touches on complex issues like gender roles, aging, and sex politics. This is how the producer described the sitcom to me. He never stopped smiling.

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