Mindless, silly stuff. I watch, when I have time. Something to remember or recall in the future? Nope; that would be defeating the purpose.
No one has yet mentioned the revenue from syndication. I suspect this series sold to USA and the various stations running it in local markets for the highest price of any show ever. Each additional season means very serious money for the producers. Now think about the lengthy afterlife enjoyed by Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond.
Any show that keeps Ed O’Neill on the air is by definition worth keeping. The man is a national treasure.
I have no clue why it still gets so much Emmy-love, especially when ABC has several other family comedies that have better actors, better stories and better jokes. The Middle is as good, if not better, than peak Roseanne.
I think that both “The Middle” and “Modern Family” are both past their prime, at this point. But I still watch 'em both! They’re still good for a few chuckles…
Definitely have noticed the dip in quality. Not quite ready to declare it dead yet.
I still enjoy it but often as not it’s “background TV” as I don’t necessarily stop what I’m doing to watch it. Even then, I don’t race to watch the new episode on Hulu or anything. I agree the stories are getting a bit weak but I enjoy the dialogue and the individual actors.
I can see why the OP might not care for the show but posing it as a question with a very obvious answer seems kind of a silly way to tell us so. Quick answer: some people like different things than you.
I’d rather see him as Vice President Baker on a West Wing sequel.
This^. I still record and watch it, but it is definitely getting long in the tooth. It was one of my favorite TV shows for several years, but the funny moments are far less frequent.
Same with The Middle, which I’ve watched from the beginning. They keep figuring out reasons to have Axel and Sue home from college.
Both shows have great characters, but I actually find the acting better on The Middle. Eden Sher (Sue Heck) should have won several Emmys several years ago.
I’m a big Sue Heck fan, and I agree with you wholeheartedly.
About “Modern Family” – I sometimes wonder if it might be better if they just focused on one of the families, say Phil, Claire and their kids, for an entire episode. Does any one else think that might work?
Without touching the merits of this particular show–I have no opinion on that, since I’ve never seen an episode–and without the question-begging “still making money” answer, I think it comes down to the simple fact that TV viewers are creatures of habit. Viewers of a particular show continue watching it because they’ve been watching it for a long time. They will put up with quality levels from a familiar show that would cause them to quickly abandon a new show, because the familiarity itself is comforting.
Looking at it from a different angle: Say you’ve been friends with someone for years. You know all their funny stories by heart, you’ve done goofy stuff together, gone on vacation together, maybe even endured life-and-death situations together. Now you’ve both settled down into fairly prosaic lives. Obviously, now that you’ve gotten all the entertainment value out of this particular friend, you stop hanging out with them, right? Well, no, most people wouldn’t. The long friendship is comfortable, like an old jacket. It may not be exciting, but it keeps you warm, and it holds echoes of all the times–better or worse–when it’s kept you warm before. So, you keep hanging out with them. Sometimes you talk about the old days, sometimes you talk about your boring current lives. Sometimes you talk about nothing in particular. The subject is less important than the familiar voice.
There’s some of that in a long-watched show. Even if the stories are shopworn and boring, the familiar faces and voices keep people coming back.
The Emmy’s are incredibly repetitive. Once you get an Emmy, there’s a good chance you’ll keep getting them.
But the 2014 Emmy’s seems to be MF’s last hurrah. One win since then in a technical category and many fewer nominations.
When the Emmy’s give up on you, you’ve been dead for a long time.
I never got the love for the show from the start. Tried watching it over two different spans. Got really tired of the predictable plots. “I know how this part is going to end.” stuff. The thing that surprised me: once in a great while there’d actually be an out-of-the-blue great joke. Why all the trite stuff if they could actually do something original once in a while? Plus a better than average cast that was very underutilized.
Modern Family’s running into the same problem. Granted Haley getting expelled from sleepaway college & going to a community college at home wasn’t much of a stretch, but how long is Alex going to have mono? And Luke & Manny go to college next season, how’s that going to be handled? Just skip the going away part & have them go to a commuter school? Wacky hijinks if they get an apartment together? Their parents could pay the rent and just have move upstairs from Cam & Mitchell; that way they’d still be in the action. It’s bad that I put that much thought into it, isn’t it?
This continues to be one of my biggest frustrations with long-running series, that they don’t allow the characters to naturally progress. And yeah, it’s especially noticeable on shows that feature young actors who start out as children. Parenthood was a hit-or-miss show for me, but one of the things that I respected the hell out of them for is how they had the oldest grandchild, Haddie Braverman, go to college at the end of the third season, and then actually had the balls to write Sarah Ramos out of the show, rather than keep contriving reasons why she had to stick around. I’d like to see more of that: let some of these kids go and work on other projects and, if they become stars, it becomes a big deal when they make a guest appearance to “come home on break.” And, if they don’t, then bring them back in a few years, after they “graduate.” Haley’s college storyline on Modern Family at least made sense, character-wise, but Alex’s college storyline is complete nonsense. From a storytelling perspective, they should have written Ariel Winter out of the show. I’m really enjoying Black-ish, but I’m not looking forward to seeing what sort of contortions they go through to justify keeping Junior and Zoey around, after they reach college age.
And, of course, it’s not just child actors: any long-running series which is a procedural, or a show in which the characters are primarily portrayed in a professional setting, is eventually going to run into the Riker/DiNozzo problem. Which is to say, you’re eventually going to start asking, “Why hasn’t this man/woman accepted a promotion already?” The longer these shows stay on the air, the more the show runners have to keep manufacturing reasons why their characters never move on with their careers. Off the top of my head, the only long-running show that I’ve watched in the last decade or so, where the storyline reason why a character left a show was for their career, and they left at a time when it made sense for the character to leave, and there wasn’t any known animosity between the actor and the show, was when Sandra Oh left Grey’s Anatomy.
There are disappointingly few show runners who have the integrity to say, “I have a story to tell, it’s going to take me X number of episodes to tell, and once I finish telling it, the show’s over!” And often, even when you do find a show runner willing to say that, the executives will be like, “Yeah, well, we own the rights to your show, and we don’t want the money train to stop, so keep making more, or we’ll replace you with somebody who will,” and they just keep on trucking, long after whatever stories that they were telling have reached what should have been their logical conclusion. It’s very unfortunate that shows can sometimes become victims of their own success, in that way.
The rising cost of production hasn’t yet met with the revenue it brings in for ABC and the actors haven’t tired enough of doing it to quit. That’s why its still on.
Similar to the “Heroes Effect”, as i like to call it. Showrunners have an interesting concept to introduce an entirely new group of folks with powers each season. But after the runaway success of the first season, the network decided they need to keep the same popular cast, and basically dump the entire concept of the show as a ‘serial’ of some sort… And of course it was never as good as that first season…