I have been watching Modern Family after getting home from the gym every day, in some way as part of my journey to establish a calming routine. I have been aware of the show much earlier. Every year, I seem to pick a TV series for which snippets on Youtube are abundantly entertaining, and watch so much of it I do not really need to watch the actual full-length show. Modern Family is great because their situational comedy contexts are very cohesive with coherent personalities–so no Barney of How I Met Your Mother with erratic behaviors (though consistently so). Some of the episodal plotlines are quite impressive to contextualize.

Yesterday I finished the episode where Gloria and Claire bicker about their roles as co-chairs of the school dance for their own sons. With confusingly suburban habits underlying the tensions throughout the festivities, it took until both retreating to the bathroom to resolve whatever qualms they have with each other. For Claire, it is because this is her thing that she has done since her first child: a motif we have seen during the Halloween’s episode, and will see again (I really have watched a lot of Youtube clips). For Gloria, it is because she wants to socialize with the other moms who she felt have boxed her as this attractive spouse-stealer, and not merely another mother who also wanted to attend to their kids’ jubilant pubescent journeys. An illustrative physical manifestation of this conflict is in the introduction of the janitor, who used to be obsessed with Claire until Gloria showed up.

This is not an atypical situation that the comedy series utilizes. The Pritchett family subsists on unresolved discomfitures, with sensibilities that seem orthogonal to each other, except for that one specific scenario wherein disoriented frustration erupts into acknowledgement of decades-long trauma. An easy psychoanalysis would indicate that these characters have nestled into the circadian rhythm of the homogenizing communities they have lived with forever. That, or they have established escapist mechanisms to preclude said trauma from ever re-entering their lives. For twenty minutes each episode, personal growth is skin-deep. Different pairs of the extended family seek a middle ground to mend their ways; for Claire and Gloria, it does not progress much further than them verbalizing their thoughts and going back to the main event.

In the 2010s, a common response to this line of character analysis is to claim that the unsettling flaw is exactly the point of the show. Some sitcoms target exceptionally unrelatable personalities; others relish in how portrayal of very commonplace life events help normalize the individual effort to improve themselves, regardless of how minor the improvement is. The viewers are supposed to root for them–the Ted Mosby, Rachel Green, or Nick Miller–as they are not bad people, yet the push and pull of life has positioned them in unique preferences that they could only ameliorate with the companionship they have as adults. They are supposed to be us, people whose sagas have taken many a twist, yet not shaken us to change our faith in the goodness of humanity.

There is some exaggeration with the purported message I am projecting, but I am unhappy with the popularity of these TV tropes. I do not appreciate the normalization of accepting your story, or merely staring at your pitfalls and declaring that the world has become too cruel to your tender soul. Take the Gloria/Claire fiasco for example. Claire is so insecure about her social status among middle school boys’ matrons that she orders Gloria to climb under the podium covered in dirt to get some chairs, and we are supposed to accept her for who she is? The same episode also continues the arc of Jay deriding Phil and his deviation from some country-club machismo, and all we get is a “sorry my old man was mean to me so I had to do it to you” after the son-in-law goes berserk harassing a mall employee? My dissatisfaction lies both in the clear unchallenged one-way disrespect and the fifteen seconds of thought put into self-reflection.

In reality, this superficial apololies stem actual personal growth. Save for generational tectonic shifts that can excuse ideological ossification (think moon-landing for boomers or COVID for zoomers), a lot of adults would benefit from further adolescing, instead of saying that they have fully formed their identity and others have to deal with it. The flawed character design might be conducive to narrative convenience, but frequently condones risk-aversion vis-a-vis leaving your comfort zone. I am of the camp that people should be more preferrable to change, scientifically experimenting with what different practical moral conducts allow them to feel. Yet too frequently does popular media take the emotional side of the flawed character, while glossing over those who actually has suffered, seeing that they have championed the miseries of their life and thus are ahead of the curve. Sure, some of our family members still have our love despite being ‘behind the times’, but that should be the exception, not the norm. Oh, poor souls that are middle-aged stay-at-home parents knowing by heart the gated neighborhood cul-de-sacs’ multigenerational vendettas! Sorry for their covertly racist remarks, they did not know better.

I love people who aspire. I used to say that I thrive on being uncomfortable with myself, seldom settling for what I currently can do, and struggling to be incomparable. I gush over Kendrick Lamar’s journey over the years, exposing the problems that plagued the world only to come back to those that hurt himself. I take corny RuPaul lyrics to heart: “Real is what you feel”, “We are all born naked and the rest is drag”, or “This is the beginning of the rest of your life.” I do not think I have ever been the single success story that can stand head and shoulders above the brilliance of the philosophers I read, the scientists I study, or the stylists I follow. But the commonality among people that dream big is the unwillingness to accept their shortcoming at the surface level, either turning it into a competitive edge or proactively striving to outshine it. Sometimes these shows highlight how that is possible: Haley coming to terms with how she is much more street-smart than bookish, and leveraging that fact against her own parents in the familial race against technology. But those moments are interspersed with defensive justifications made in poor taste for want of light-hearted humor, and there sustains a culture uneasy about confronting its own deficiencies.