Modern Family's series finale is a feel-good farewell to their audience

By Naylii Sophea

There’s a good chance that it’s been quite a while since you last watched Modern Family. The ABC comedy has wrapped its 11th and final season on Wednesday. It’s an inevitable part of the TV lifecycle, even the most innovative and original series and Modern Family was eventually shoved under the radar by the endless churn of the new. But Modern Family never stopped being funny, and the finale was comfortingly consistent with the series as a whole as a snappy, smart, and unabashedly sentimental celebration of the folks we love (and sometimes hate) the most.

In the final two episodes, it was chaos as usual for the Dunphy and Pritchett clans: Just as married dads Cam (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) are settling into their new home with their daughter Lily (Aubrey Anderson-Emmons) and baby son Rexford, Cam unexpectedly gets offered the coaching job at University of North Central Missouri. Phil (Ty Burrell) and Claire Dunphy (Julie Bowen) have taken to living in a motorhome parked in their driveway to escape the pandemonium of their house, which is filled with their boomerang brood: Luke (Nolan Gould), Alex (Ariel Winter), Haley (Sarah Hyland), son-in-law Dylan (Reid Williams), and grandbabies Poppy and George. 

Of course, nothing works out the way anyone hopes — Claire and Phil wind up with an empty nest they didn’t actually want, and Mitchell gives up his dream home for a life in the Midwest — but that doesn’t mean nothing works out. In the ever-optimistic world of Modern Family, things fall apart in serendipitous ways, and fans were left with the comforting sense that the 13(!) characters they’ve followed for years would all be okay in the end.

In the finale, each of the main characters got their goodbye moment, many of which were rooted in physical comedy, a series staple: Mitchell and Claire forming a human claw machine to retrieve their old ice-skating trophy; Gloria and Manny sharing a heartfelt mother-son moment (before she handcuffs him to the bathtub faucet); Alex and Haley tormenting little brother Luke one last time by making him reprise his childhood role of “Woofy the dog”; Jay revealing to Gloria that he’s finally (finally!) learning Spanish. Cam fans, meanwhile, got to watch him do two of his favorite things: Sing karaoke and share rapid-fire facts about his comedically cornpone hometown (“It’s just a short ride on Hamtrack”).