Modern Family's Mockumentary Format Was Different From The Office In One Major Way
While it wasn't the first show to utilize the format, "The Office" helped popularize the mockumentary style that influenced countless network sitcoms in its immediate wake. One of the shows in the direct lineage of the American "Office" is ABC's "Modern Family," which supplements an otherwise standard family sitcom premise with realty series-style talking head segments.
That said, in an interview Entertainment Weekly published in conjunction with the final episode of "Modern Family" first airing, co-creator Christopher Lloyd highlighted one key way his show's incorporation of mockumentary conventions differs from its principal source of inspiration. The final season of "The Office," notably, not only acknowledges the crew filming its fictional docu-series, but incorporates sound guy Brian Wittle (Chris Diamantopoulos) as a major character. "Modern Family," meanwhile, makes no such acknowledgement of whomever is behind its in-fiction cameras.
"We started out in our pilot having that person be a character. And then the more we thought about, we thought, 'That might take the audience out of it.' And then having lived in a mockumentary form without literally a crew for 250 episodes, it felt like it might've been to meta or too cute to maybe do that for us," Lloyd said. "Because I think 'The Office' made you aware that they were actual people much more than we did. We were just using it as a technique more than a sort of an actual reality."
Just who was filming Modern Family's talking heads is one of the show's biggest mysteries
Christopher Lloyd's explanation of why "Modern Family" ultimately opted not to acknowledge its documentary format both makes sense logically and helps distinguish its style from that of "The Office." However, that doesn't mean fans have simply accepted this decision. For example, plenty of fans have started Reddit threads, both while the show was airing and in its wake, explicitly wondering who's behind the interview cameras in "Modern Family." One Reddit thread even proposes that, instead of hiding off-screen camera people, the series adheres to sci-fi logic. "Does everyone in this world just look at an empty spot in space and pretend there is a camera there so they can rant about their lives?" its opening post asks.
"Jimmy Kimmel Live" even aired a sketch with members of the "Modern Family" cast in which Kimmel himself turns out to be the show's fictional documentarian, mining the absurdity of this unanswered question for a bit.
Meanwhile, a 2020 book titled "The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s" claims that contributors to "The Office" were openly critical of the mockumentary format in "Modern Family." Now that the show is over, fans officially lack an explanation for this convention, and will simply have to accept that it's an unimportant loose plot thread — or maybe decide that it's actually Kimmel and call it a day.