Modern Family: “The Wedding (Part 1)”

Is there more than one way to do a wedding episode of a sitcom, other than to have months of planning spiral into chaos as miniature crises coalesce into an all-out disaster? That’s not necessarily a dig at “The Wedding (Part 1).” It’s really just a question. It would be silly to expect anything else from Modern Family, which has never really been a show to answer the question “How can we tell this story differently?” and is perfectly content with “How would a conventional telling of this story be different with our characters?” That’s totally fair for this, or any, sitcom really, but while it’s easy to excuse someone for not trying to reinvent the wheel, it is interesting to wonder if the wheel could use some fine-tuning.
But for what it was—a very traditional non-traditional wedding episode—“The Wedding (Part 1)” is a pretty good one, albeit one that hangs a lot of funny lines on a flimsy frame. It’s hard to completely fault the structural deficiencies, seeing as this is the first of two parts, and the second half might elegantly braid the whole thing together. But I’m very curious to see what next week’s episode looks like, and whether it’ll make me question the wisdom of airing the episodes a week apart rather than as a hour-long event, which ABC has done with Modern Family on several occasions.
The structural issue with “The Wedding” isn’t so much related to the plots it introduces, though man alive, are there a lot of plates spinning here. As is to be expected at a wedding, the gang’s all here: Pepper and Ronaldo as predictably persnickety wedding planners; a very pregnant Sal and her latest beau/victim; Cam’s folks; even Andy pops up to reaffirm his existence. Considering there are already weeks when Modern Family struggles to smoothly integrate its 11 regulars, to fit in this many guest appearances basically mandated an episode that flits from one story to the next at a breakneck pace. While that could have been a weakness, the episode’s attention deficit worked to its advantage: If there’s a story you can’t stand, you don’t have to stand it for long.
Let’s come back to all those threads, though, and first talk about what the structural issue with “The Wedding” is, which is the deflating conclusion to the impressively executed faux-cliffhanger of “Message Received.” It wasn’t as if Jay would skip Mitch and Cam’s wedding, so I appreciate that it wasn’t a serious consideration, but after briefly flicking at Jay and Mitch’s argument toward the beginning, the script doesn’t do much of anything with Jay’s discomfort other than pair him with Merle so they can be squicked out together. But there was no immediate payoff. It’s almost like “The Wedding (Part 1)” is the second part of a three-part episode but with the main conflict jettisoned in favor of the emergency du jour.