A book on Modern Family

modern family

Told from the perspective of an unseen documentary filmmaker, the series offers an honest, oftenhilarious perspective of family life. Parents Phil and Claire yearn for an honest, open relationship with their three kids. But a daughter who is trying to grow up too fast, another who is too smart for her own good, and a rambunctious young son make it challenging.

Claire’s dad, Jay, and his Latina wife, Gloria, are raising two sons together, but people sometimes believe Jay to be Gloria’s father. Jay’s gay son, Mitchell, and his partner, Cameron, have adopted a little Asian girl, completing one big -- straight, gay, multicultural, traditional -- happy family.

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The running joke about Jay forgetting that Mitchell is gay was inspired from Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s real life.

He recalled, “At one point, he asked me if I had a girlfriend after I’d already come out to him, and I had to reiterate, ‘No, Dad, I’m gay.’” Meanwhile, he also said, “My father and I have a relationship similar to the one Ed and I have on the show.”

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Initially, producers wanted Jesse Tyler Ferguson to audition for the role of Cameron

Ferguson told Out magazine, “I was immediately drawn to Mitchell, but they really only wanted to see me for Cameron [Mitchell’s partner]. So I went in and read for Cameron, and halfway through they stopped me and said, ‘You’d be a really good Mitchell, actually.’” Luckily, Ferguson managed to persuade them.

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Bowen explained, “They would just bring me in and stare at my stomach. I think legally maybe they couldn’t say like ‘What’s that about...’ So I’d go home and cry and think I’m never going to get this -- the greatest job in the world -- so I took myself out of first place for it…”

Julie Bowen almost passed on the part because she was pregnant during the pilot and didn’t think she stood a chance.

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Steve Levitan And Christopher Lloyd created the character Gloria with Sofia Vergara in mind.

Vergara revealed, “They had meetings with me at the beginning and they would ask me things, because the character has a lot of similarities with my real life. I am an immigrant in this country, I have an accent, I’m Colombian, I have a child from a previous marriage. So it was created around me.”

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Sofia Vergara once called out the show’s writers for making her character too Mexican.

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Vergara told TIME, “I went to the writers and said, ‘We wouldn’t do this, Colombians don’t dress like that. I cannot blame the writers. You write what you know, and you cannot tell an American writer to write about some other culture and expect that it will be as natural as writing about an American person.”

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Levitan referred to it as a “wonderful device,” saying, “The documentary form itself is such a wonderful device to get to the heart of a story, cut to the chase of what a character is thinking. You don’t have to work in funky, awkward exposition. You cut to it, and you are right there.”

The creator referred to the documentary format as a ‘Wonderful Device’

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Cast members don’t get copies of scripts that don’t involve their character

At one point, Hyland took to Instagram with a post that read, “So I don’t read scripts of the episodes of Modern Family that I’m not in, so I just found out that my grandpa’s dead along with all of you.” She also added, “As his granddaughter, you’d think I’d be invited to the funeral.”

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Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Ty Burrell tend to ruin takes because they crack up a lot.

Bowen revealed, “He and Ty together are terrible because they can’t stop cracking each other up. Those two delight in one another so much. They have this little face that they make at each other, and then that’s it. They’ll just crack up, for the rest of the day. So, those two probably ruin the most takes for each other.”

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