I’d take the most Modern Family on television to dinner and show them real modern

I first watched Modern Family in high school, but the part of me that fell in love with the show was rooted in little 5-year-old me—an only child of Korean immigrants who longed for a boisterous, messy, heartfelt family like the Dunphy-Pritchett-Tucker clan.

No siblings, cousins, or grandparents for miles, since my relatives lived 8,153 kilometers away in Korea. As the child who perpetually played with Barbie dolls on my living room carpet alone, I envied large families where the clash and excitement of big personalities was part of daily routine. For that reason, Modern Family is one of my top three comfort sitcoms (Friends and Brooklyn Nine-Nine claim the other spots). The show follows the families of Jay Pritchett and his two grown children, Claire and Mitchell, and their daily trials and pleasures of raising a family in LA. There’s a mix of colourful personalities and diverse characters including Jay’s young Colombian wife, Claire’s brainiac middle-school daughter, and Mitchell’s farm-boy husband.

Now serving one chaotic family with a side of mashed potatoes

My big, grand plan if I entered the lives of the Dunphy-Pritchett-Tucker clan… is to have dinner with them.

As a busy university student, I’ve noticed an individualistic culture in Vancouver. Everyone’s preoccupied with the million items on their to-do list and laser-focused on achieving their next milestone, the next internship, the next job. Rallying the group chat to bring friends together for a simple meal can be a harder mountain to climb than Everest.

That’s why my heart warms at how frequently the characters in Modern Family make time for each other. In season 10, episode 2, the clan even accidentally gathers at Jay’s house “through a series of assumptions, old emails, and lazy, sheeplike thinking.” Hilarious. And goals, frankly. I want a family where gatherings are so normalized that we attend accidental ones without batting an eye. I’d love to sit at the dinner table and hear the latest boy drama from Haley, complain that Luke’s latest body spray is making me lose my appetite, and grin into my soup as Claire and Cam bicker about each other’s parenting styles. After all, life is about the simple moments.

I know it’s a bit of a boring answer and perhaps this challenge warrants a more riveting scenario. But it’s my answer from the heart. Modern Family is a show about the mundane joys of family in everyday life—and that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

Long story short: I want to join the family. But if I think about it more seriously, I can’t help but be bugged by the fact that—despite the show’s diversity—it is a predominantly White family. And I, decidedly, am not.

Make Modern Family more modern

Hot take? Or obvious?

Modern Family is known to depict quintessential family dynamics relatable to any family. However, as an only child of first-generation Korean immigrants, I more often found myself seeing things I couldn’t relate to. Daily moments from my childhood included tasting homemade kimchi that my mom mixed in big bowls on the kitchen floor, translating my own school permission slips for my parents to sign, and seeing my immigrant family friends endure backbreaking jobs to pay the bills. I never saw that on Modern Family.

While the show explores the complexities of mixed-race families, the non-White characters are fairly White-washed. Joe grows up without learning any Spanish. Mitch and Cam don’t prioritize raising Lily with influences from her Vietnamese culture. And at the end of the day, the backbone of the Pritchett-Dunphy-Tucker clan is Jay Pritchett, a wealthy White man.

So I’d like to stir the pot. When I think about living in a sitcom world like Modern Family, I can’t pass up the opportunity to introduce a different kind of cultural family experience. I’d marry one of the kids (as a straight twenty-year-old girl, the only viable marriage prospects are Luke and Manny but to be frank they’re both a bit icky in the latter seasons. Maybe I’ll wait for Joe to grow up) and raise a family that deals with the tensions of being a half-Korean family in North America. My kids on the show would navigate the trials of dual cultural identity—they’d struggle to determine which cultural values to adopt for themselves, face the challenges of dating non-Korean people when half their relatives don’t speak English, and balance the tension of gratitude and guilt towards immigrant family members who sacrificed so much to be here but somehow fall short compared to other kids’ parents.

I’m not bashing Modern Family (favourite comfort sitcom, remember?), simply pointing out that some privileges afforded to the Dunphy-Pritchett-Tucker clan restrict the type of family experience it can represent. And if I’m going to join the world of a sitcom about family, I can’t ignore how my own upbringing clashes with theirs.

Joyce, you’re taking this too seriously… like always

Probably. I should have just said, “I want to go to magic camp with Luke, go dress shopping with Gloria, and babysit Lily on Halloween.” But my brain doesn’t work that way. It’s messier.

But so is family. And that’s the whole point of Modern Family.