Modern Family: Season 2, Episode 22 – Good Cop Bad Dog

With just a few episodes left in the season, Modern Family was new again this week with Good Cop Bad Dog. This episode dealt with role reversals in each of the families, and for the most part it was fairly successful.

Let’s look at the Dunphys first, as they were the strongest story of the evening. Claire is sick of being the “bad cop” so she insists that Phil and her trade styles. Claire takes Luke and Manny go-karting and tells Phil to stay home and make sure that the girls clean their bathroom. Both of them take it way too far, in classic Dunphy fashion. Claire is so dead set on the boys having fun that she can’t even realize that they are miserable.

Meanwhile, Phil makes the mistake of trusting Haley and Alex, and they sneak off without actually cleaning their bathroom. Upon realizing this, he chases them out of the house and jumps on Haley’s car! This throws Phil over the edge, and he makes them clean the bathroom until its spotless, and then assigns them other household projects while refusing to feed them.

Mitch and Cam have tickets to see Lady GaGa, but Cam has fallen ill. Mitch wants to go to the concert anyway, but feels guilty because Cam always takes care of him. (We get to see a funny flashback of Cam carrying Mitch into the kitchen.) Once Cam chugs some Nyquil, Mitch decides to sneak off without him. Not much meat to this storyline, but it provided some chuckle-worthy moments.

That brings me to what I think is the weakest storyline of the evening. Gloria has invited a man over to the house so that he can get business advice from Jay. The man (played by Lin-Manuel Miranda) has a lot of enthusiasm, but a strange idea for a “good doggie, bad doggie training system.” Jay in his crippling honesty tells the man that his idea is terrible. Jay convinces Gloria that she has to learn to say no, to which Gloria responds by taking the man’s dog so that he can move. Jay holds firm and decides to take the dog away. I have two problems with this whole story-arch.

First, the premise is centered around the fact that Gloria collects needy people and tries to help them. Haven’t we seen that exact same story play out with Cameron? Second, I was hoping for a great guest appearance from Lin-Manuel Miranda (who wrote and originally stared in the Tony award winning Broadway musical “In the Heights,” one of my personal favorites.) However, he didn’t have much to work with, as his character was written with zero depth. The best part of this story was Gloria confusing sugar coating for “putting on a sugar jacket.”

In the end, the writers tried to tie all of the story lines together under monologue delivered by Gloria about why people end up with the people they love. Jay ends up being the one who can’t say no, and he takes the dog back home. Mitch tries to pretend that he’s been by Cam’s side the entire time, but he has a neon necklace on, which he forget to stop from blinking. When Claire brings the boys home, she and Phil decide that they fit best in the roles they already have. (Good, we need Phil to be the fun one.) All in all, this episode was not as good as last week, but I’ve come to expect a lot from Modern Family. I enjoyed two of the three stories, which is a fairly decent score.

Memorable quotes below the jump:

Memorable quotes:

Mitch: We could sell the tickets online, but there’s that Craigslist killer.

Phil: Sweet and sour chicken!

Luke: I’m twelve, I need limits.