I am aware that I should have chosen a movie, but - let's be honest - I am not a movie person. However, I love series and automatically one of them pops into my head, when it comes to discuss American culture and way of life: Modern Family.
Its relevance to the American cultural context and to the spectatorship experience is due to a lot of reasons which make it a very special TV series. First of all, each episode is only 20 minutes long, the right amount of time for one not to get bored, but – on the contrary - excited for the continuation of the story. Still, most importantly, Modern Family is not only a comedy series. It also sheds a light on identity issues, hybridity and the role of men, women and marriage in contemporary society.
The spectator has already entered inside the lives of the Pritchett-Dunphy-Tucker family for seven seasons and more than 150 episodes, since 2009. This Modern Family pater familias is Jay Pritchett, who is married to Colombian Gloria, who already has a teenage son (Manny) of a previous relationship. Together, they have a baby (Fulgencio Umberto, or Joe). From his first marriage, Jay has two (no longer) children: Mitchell and Claire. Mitchell is homosexual and married to Cameron Tucker, with whom he adopted a Vietnamese baby that grows up before our eyes as seasons go by (Lily). Finally, Claire is married to Phil Dunphy (the cool dad) and they have a son (Luke) and two daughters (Alex and Haley).
In terms of discussed topics, the series conglomerates a rich list of them, sometimes stereotyping, other times giving voice to struggles that start to emerge in modern families and that are personified by the characters: 'old' parents (Jay), homosexual marriage and adoption (Mitchell and Cameron), South American immigration and being a single mother (Gloria), working and simultaneously loving mothers (Claire), fathers who start to have a relevant role inside their homes (Phil), how to raise children in the 21st century, men that are sensible and not flawless anymore, women that have a strong personality and are independent of their husbands and fathers... These turn out to be shared concerns inside American families, though we could say they are generally present in Western families as well, so the series brings about current hot topics, themselves common ground to millions of people all over the world.
In terms of spectatorship experience, it is equally crucial to refer that Modern Family's actors share their stardom thanks to an ensemble cast structure. This means that a reasonable number of protagonists are given the same amount of screen time, which is obviously the case, regarding the characters/actors in the series. Usually, as it is proven, the characters' lives and stories are somehow intertwined. We also get in contact with this type of structure in recent movies, such as Babel and The Avengers. These three examples in television and cinema state a difference and reveal an evolution from the sole main character structure, present in almost all of the Hollywood productions.
Another special attribute concerning Modern Family consists on classifying it as a phenomenon that seems to have been popularized since the 1980s and 1990s: a mockumentary (or docu-comedy), or a mocking documentary, a parody, whose objective is to film a movie or a series in a way that people actually perceive it more easily as portraying real events, with real people, while having a good time. Obviously, this will increase the spectator's level of immersion or suspension of disbelief and, consequently, reflect on the way people receive and think over the concerned episodes of modern life, even if the episodes make them laugh.
Combining an outstanding premise and plot with innovative or, at least, reborn cinematic techniques, Modern Family deserves all the prizes and great reviews that it has been given ever since it started. In my modest opinion, sooner or later it may become the representation of a turning point in society, through which American and Western culture are conveyed.
It is only a shame that in Portugal it has not yet been created a resembling TV show. The only resemblance we share is a right-wing mayor who looks just like Phil Dunphy.
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