Analysis Of Modern Family

Modern Family, one of the highest rated comedy series on television, currently in its 8th year of production, follows the daily lives of a father, his two children, and their respective families. The show has received numerous awards and accolades from critics for its incorporation of comedy, parenthood, and current day issues, all in one show. The sitcom is set in Los Angeles, an ethnically diverse city known for its liberal and progressive views. Jay Pritchett depicts a rigid, middle-aged successful business executive, who after a much unhappy marriage to an apparently crazy woman, Dee Dee, is now married to his trophy wife, Gloria. They together have a young child, Joe. Gloria is from Colombia and has a young son, Manny, from her previous

Jay’s son Mitchell (a conservative attorney) is married to Cameron “Cam” (a flamboyant and colorful “bumpkin” from Missouri) and they have an adopted Vietnamese child named Lily. This paper will attempt to demonstrate how the writers and producers of Modern Family, through telling relatable stories, encourage acceptance of an emerging family structure, and address a number of social values and issues. Through blending the trials and tribulations of heterosexual, interracial, and gay families, and adding issues faced by baby boomers and adolescents, the writers portray socially conflicting issues as normal family behavior. Using textual and narrative analysis, this paper will deconstruct the overall plot and analyze the roles of the characters, to reveal the underlying message of this comedy sitcom and the reasons for its commercial success but relative failure as a mechanism to promote cultural

It is a methodology - a data-gathering process - for those researchers who want to understand the ways in which members of various cultures and subcultures make sense of who they are, and of how they fit into the world in which they live. (p. 1)

Textual analysis involves in-depth structured research across multiple areas of what influences human behavior. Sillars & Gronbeck identify three main interpretative approaches used by critics: First, rhetorical tradition, which is concerned with relationship between discourses and their ability to influence identity, belief, attitudes and values; Second is social tradition, which deals with how our understanding of the world is constructed by language and social relationships; and lastly, cultural tradition, which relates to the influence of value systems in decision making (Sillars & Gronbeck,