‘Modern Family’ Aired Its Finale Last Night, But That May Not Be the End
The way the series ended felt designed to leave the door to spin-offs wide open.
Last night, the 250th and final episode of Modern Family aired on ABC. The three couples at the center of the show went their separate ways, leaving the door to future adventures in new settings wide open.
Cam and Mitchell move to the Midwest after Cam is hired as a college football coach. Jay and Gloria decide to travel to South America to see her family for the first time since their wedding. Sudden empty-nesters Phil and Claire decide to go on a cross-country road trip.
Series co-creator Christopher Lloyd spoke to Entertainment Weekly about why the show ended the way it did.
“We embraced that idea of putting people on new paths that are exciting for the audience to imagine, but also necessitates a big goodbye from everyone,” Lloyd said. “And that will add a bittersweet quality to the end, but feels fitting because families do morph. It’s the type of change a lot of people feel in their own families, and we wanted to capture that.”
In addition to its logic as an ending, the finale also makes sense as a beginning of sorts.
After losing one of the highest-rated and most-awarded shows on TV, ABC will doubtlessly be keen to develop spin-offs that by nature have a built-in audience. When asked about that possibility in another interview with Deadline, Lloyd signaled that he was open to the idea.
“Will that happen? I’m not sure, but we would be probably dumb to not explore it. However, doing a spinoff is fraught in a lot of ways and we won’t do it unless we feel confident there’s something there, I don’t want to say it’s a long shot, it’s under discussion but we’ll see. We don’t want to jump into something like that, particularly because Modern Family is a tough act to follow, but that is a possibility.”
So while Modern Family might be over, don’t be surprised to see some of its characters on screen again in the not-so-distant future.
