I Know That’s Me But I’m Not Remembering Any Of This

Just a short post tonight. I’ll hopefully have Thursday’s line up for you soon.

Spoilers...

Modern Family – “Door to Door” (B)

“Door to Door” would have scored lower if it wasn’t for David Cross’s cameo. His incense over not getting an ice cream cake bumped this episode up almost a full letter grade. Well that and the video of Phil getting hit in the face over and over again. That probably shouldn’t have been as funny as it was.

The rest of “Door to Door” was pretty mediocre. I found Gloria’s story to be the worst. While it was mildly amusing to watch Cam walk around playing Stan from A Street Car Named Desire, in the end it was a pretty one-note joke and the rest of the storyline didn’t arc. She lost the dog and then she found the dog. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

I think it was the door to door theme that really did the episode in. By forcing most of the cast into situations where they had to be in front of a strangers door by the middle of the episode, it hindered the episode’s ability to develop each storyline individually, and subsequently made them all worse for wear.

I mentioned the lack of an arc with Gloria above, but the same could be said for Cam and Mitchell. With all the confusion over when the adoption agency was making their house visit, how many of you didn’t see that ending coming? All of the elements were in place in the first five minutes, and because Cam had to help Gloria out – putting him in front of an old man’s front door in the middle of the episode – there wasn’t anywhere to go with it.

Jay and Manny faired a little better but not enough to save the premise. I liked seeing Manny trick Jay into buying all of his wrapping paper (“You’ll never go broke playing to a rich guy’s ego”), but I could have done without the Jay-is-old undertones of the story. The writers seem to go to that well a lot and it’s starting to lose its appeal.

Alright, now to my favourite lines:

CAM: I’m going to take Lilly to school and when I get back home I’m going to scrub this place like a crime scene, which it is because you’ve murdered joy.

PHIL: I’ve always said that if my son thinks of me as one of his idiot friends than I’ve succeeded as a dad.

CLAIRE: Uh wow Phil, what are you doing here?
PHIL: I’m your husband. I’m Blind Siding you.

And line of the night:

PHIL: I’ll get straight to the point because this is important and that appears to be an ice cream cake.
TRAFFIC COMMITTEE GUY: Well it’s not!