Modern Family: The Cover-Up (7x16)

Ugh. What the hell. Ew. I'm not happy. Honestly I don't even know how to express my distaste. This episode was actually a big fat disappointment. I thought I could trust this show with certain basic things, at least, and it turns out I cannot.

Cons:

The main plot of the week follows Phil and Claire hiding secrets from each other. Phil meets a beautiful woman in a coffee shop and agrees to help her look for a house. He lies about the woman to Claire, saying that she's an old fat Irish woman, because Claire knows that black women are Phil's type, and he doesn't want Claire to get upset. Meanwhile, Claire goes with Gloria to a yoga class and the super attractive yoga instructor is very flirty and physical with Claire, putting his hands all over her. Claire doesn't seem to mind, and even declares that Gloria is jealous that she, Claire, was the one getting all the attention. Phil and Claire both try and hide their attractions to these other people. In the end, Angie (the black woman that Phil is attracted to) catches on that something weird is going on, and the whole truth comes out. Claire and Phil explain to Angie that Phil isn't racist, he's just attracted to black women.

Okay honestly? This was just stupid and racist as hell. Phil's type is "black women"? Like... all black women? News flash: women who have black skin have just as much diversity of appearance as any other race. And the fact that Phil told Claire so vehemently that this woman Angie was white just highlights the weirdness all the more. You could do this plot with the same actress playing Angie without making it about race at all... Phil could just be trying to hide the fact that his client is an attractive young woman. And Claire? It was actually really inappropriate how much enjoyment she was getting out of the yoga instructor's attention. If I were in a relationship, I wouldn't want my partner to allow that kind of contact with somebody else. And the end of the episode, when they talk to Angie and her boyfriend? Apparently Angie's boyfriend (also black) has a thing for Claire, which somehow makes the whole thing okay. I don't know... this whole plot thread just made me cringe. And to give Phil, a generally nice and charmingly silly guy, a plot thread that paints him as such a jackass was actually kind of hard to watch.

In a much more tolerable but still fairly boring plot thread, Jay has started an internet show where he rambles about the things that bother him about society (hashtags, menus written on blackboards...). Basically, Manny set this show up to save him and Gloria from having to listen to Jay's rants. Jay gets annoyed with a commenter who continually insults him, and Manny asks Alex to get some of her nerd friends to help track the IP address. Jay and Manny show up at the guy's house... and it's Earl, his old competitor in the closet business. The two of them get into a fight, but then they realize that they used to push each other to be the best in business. Maybe the same thing can work here - Earl could come on Jay's show and they could do a point-counterpoint thing. But it turns out that they agree about everything, so it won't work. Jay declares that their agreements are a bad thing - it means Earl can't add anything new to the internet show.

I liked some things about this plot thread, and I'll get there in a sec - but the premise was pretty weak, the idea of Jay being an old guy with silly old guy opinions isn't getting a lot of mileage, and Earl was never very funny to me to begin with.

Pros:

Jay's plot thread did have a couple of funny moments - I liked the fact that the internet show was set up just as a way to spare Manny and Gloria from Jay's rants. And I liked Jay and Earl agreeing about everything, from whether or not they missed milk men to their shared passion for closets.

The only winning plot thread of the night goes to Mitchell, Cam, and Lily. Cam is determined to teach Lily how to ride a bike, while Mitchell is okay with Lily taking her time. When Cam forces them to come with him to the park, things go wrong when Cam falls and breaks his arm. Not wanting to scare Lily away from ever trying to ride a bike, Cam insists that he hide the injury from Lily until he can come up with another plausible excuse for the broken arm. When he gets home, he pretends to fall in the bathroom to explain the injury, but actually does fall and hit his head. In the end, Lily takes to riding a bike quite easily.

This plot thread was nothing particularly special, but it made me chuckle and felt very true to the characters. My favorite part is when Cam gets back from having fallen off of his bike, and Mitchell asked him if he fell because of the shirtless jogger. "I know, right?" Cam replies. This, juxtaposed with all of Claire and Phil's weird secretive behavior, was a much clearer idea of how a couple might react when one or both of them is attracted to somebody else. There's no weird jealousy angle, there's just two men who both find the same random jogger super attractive.

Lily's dialogue was also spot-on in this episode - I especially liked it when she saw her friends on bikes and they asked her if she didn't know how to ride her bike. She said she did - she was just teaching her dads how to teach a kid how to ride a bike. Ha!

That's all I've got for this one. It's a shame that Cam, Mitchell, and Lily's plot thread had to take place in an episode with such subpar stories in it. Unfortunately, the bad far outweighs the good here.

5.5/10