Jesse Tyler Ferguson details the forgotten roots of ‘Modern Family’

Just Shoot Me! and Shrinking star Wendie Malick made a recent appearance on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast Dinner’s on Me to talk about her lengthy career and eat a tuna melt. The pair have known each other for a while, with Ferguson guesting on Hot in Cleveland and Malick appearing on Modern Family.

Reflecting on the 11 seasons of Pritchett family adventures, Ferguson let listeners in on a forgotten fact about the celebrated series that won 22 Primetime Emmys during its run.

“[The reason] it was a mockumentary, although we never explained this, was a very early version of Modern Family had a foreign exchange student that had stayed with Mitchell, my character, and [Julie Bowen‘s] Claire when we were young,” he explained. “And he was coming back to do a documentary about this family he lived with when he was a kid, and the title of it was My American Family.” 

Ferguson continued, “They ended up cutting that character and then renaming it Modern Family. But the construct of it still being a mockumentary was there, but we never explained why.”

He added that “in the very early seasons, we would really try and hold onto the reality that we were with a film crew,” which has us itching to fire up Peacock and do a close compare and contrast of early episodes to later ones.

Malick, probably echoing what all of us would say if we parachuted in for a season 11 guest shot like she did, said, “I don’t even remember thinking about that.”

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Ferguson noted, “If you watch early episodes, it’s like, ‘Oh, it actually is feasible that this is a reality show.’ And then season five, six is just, like, we’re opening our doors coming home from getting groceries and there’s a camera crew in our house, and no one questions that.”

By the time Modern Family launched in 2009, The Office had been using the mockumentary style for four years, so most viewers were already attuned to the situational grammar, if we may use an egghead term.

The Office, of course, was not the first to play in this comedy sandbox. Neither was the British version of The Office, which launched in 2001, though that was among the first television series to run with it. Sketch comedy shows, particularly Monty Python’s Flying Circus, had deployed the gimmick several times.

On film, some great examples of the technique include This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s classic parody of rock & roll culture from 1984, which is actually getting a long-awaited sequel later this year. Christopher Guest, Tap‘s lead guitarist and backing vocalist Nigel Tufnel, picked up the schtick with several other movies in the style, most famously Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.

But Spinal Tap was also far from the first. Back in 1969, Woody Allen directed and starred in Take the Money and Run, a parody of a crime exposé.

More relevant to Modern Family though is surely Albert Brooks‘ Real Life, a 1979 comedy that was a spin on what a “making of” documentary about a modern family would look like. It was released six years after the debut of the very real PBS documentary An American Family, in which a crew was embedded with the Loud family of Santa Barbara, Calif. — an early example of what we’d now call reality TV.

This trailer for Real Life does a terrible job of selling what the movie is, but it’s pretty indicative of Brooks’ style of humor.

Anyhow, you can play the full episode of Dinner’s on Me with guest Wendie Malick right here.