I have watched Modern Family eight times. That is about two thousand episodes, or roughly 730 hours, which is a number I did not want to calculate and now cannot forget.
It is my comfort show. After a long day I do not want something new. I want something I already know will be kind to me, where the misunderstanding clears up by the end and everyone is still at the same dinner table.
Why watch something you already know
The eighth time is not about what happens. I know what happens. It is about noticing things. On the first watch I laughed at Phil. By the fifth I was watching Claire, who holds the whole house together while everyone thinks she is the uptight one. By the eighth, I was watching Jay.
Jay
Jay Pritchett is the grandfather. Gruff, impatient, allergic to feelings. He is also the character I understand best now.
He is tough, but he is fair. Jay says the thing nobody wants to hear, and he is usually right. He is never cruel about it. He is the one who tells you the plan will not work, and then helps you find the one that will.
He shows love by showing up. Jay almost never says it. He fixes the thing, pays for the thing, drives across the city for the thing. You learn to read the love in what he does, not what he says.
He built something. Pritchett’s Closets & Blinds is not glamorous. Jay built it himself and is proud of it. That pride in making something real, and useful, and yours, is the part of Jay I recognise most in myself these days, especially now that I am building GasView.
The part that stays
The Jay I come back to is Jay at work. In the store, on the phone with a supplier, walking a customer through a closet he could build in his sleep. At home he can be clumsy. At work he knows exactly who he is: a man who built a business with his own hands and still cares whether the shelves are straight.
That is the Jay I want to be at forty. Not the closets. The care. Building something useful, standing behind it, and still caring about the small things after years of doing it.
If you have never watched it
Start at the beginning and give it three episodes. If you are anything like me, you will be on your second rewatch before you know it, and you will have picked a Pritchett or a Dunphy you secretly are.
Which one are you?
