Modern Family
An ABC mockumentary-style sitcom about three connected families, co-created by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd.
Where Modern Family comes up1 episode or test
Modern Family grew from Levitan and Lloyd swapping real weekend stories, then six weeks spent only on character dynamics before any scenes. Episodes ran 21:30 with three or four stories and ten characters, and the pilot drew laughter and applause at the upfronts. Lesson: build characters and story first, draw jokes from real life, and let each story feed one theme.
- 1Rewrite and break storiesMon–Tue: six or seven writers rewrite
- 2Others break future storiesThe other half works ahead
- 3Table readWednesday lunch
- 4Rewrite dueFriday
- 5ShootMonday, plus production meetings and editing
From Steven Levitan on the writers' room
What was said about Modern Family
1How Modern Family came out of the creators' own lives
The show began as real weekend stories the two creators swapped. Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd traded stories about their weekends on Monday mornings and realized those were more compelling than the other show idea they were developing.
Levitan says they were "constantly stealing from our wives and kids." Jay's house and the circle where Jay teaches Gloria to ride a bike were real spots near Levitan's home, where he taught his own kids.
Writers captured family dialogue as it happened and used it verbatim. Levitan typed his kids' kitchen-table fights into his phone, and Alex and Haley's staircase fight used their actual lines. His kids stared at him when it aired.
Breakup advice he gave his son went badly and became an Alex story, which his son disliked seeing on TV. A borrowed boy's name worried his daughter that people would think she had a crush. His first test for any scene is "does it feel real? ... are they talking the way people talk?"
They picked how families had changed as the show's reason to exist. No family show spoke to families of the day after Raymond ended, so they built in a gay couple raising a kid, an immigrant cross-cultural and cross-generational family, and the way smartphones changed family life.
Levitan's own tech obsession fed stories, given to the nerdy characters, such as Phil appearing on a rolling iPad robot. Setting it in LA meant no hiding palm trees or license plates.
2Six weeks on character dynamics before any script
Give every pair of characters a tension so their relationship crackles. Levitan calls it "two points in a line": like Oscar the messy and Felix the neat, each added character gets a tense line to every other one, like bicycle spokes. He and Lloyd spent about six weeks talking only about the characters and their dynamics.
The goal is to know what would be funny about any two of them stuck in an elevator before writing. He says a premise alone gets old but dynamics can play "for hopefully hundreds of episodes."
3Breaking stories in the writers' room
Treat the story as the hard part; the script follows. Levitan tells the joke of the screenwriter who finishes the outline and says he is 90% done, and says his room felt the same: once a story works, the draft is easy.
Some stories broke fast; others left the room with five days and nothing. When stuck, he advises working on something else, because "creativity is connections."
Each season opened with eight to ten weeks of story breaking. Starting June 1, the room asked "what if" and built mostly episodic stories one at a time, with occasional arcs like Mitch and Cam's wedding or Gloria's baby. Levitan said it felt like math word problems all day and left his brain throbbing.
In season, Monday and Tuesday were the rewrite with six or seven writers while the other half broke future stories, a table read came at Wednesday lunch, and the rewrite was due Friday for a Monday shoot, on top of production meetings and editing.
Pick one theme per episode and make every story feed it. Levitan wants to know what an episode is trying to say, ideally from the start. An episode called 15% asked whether people can change, answering maybe, by 15%, and that can be enough.
Caught in the Act used its title phrase to mean several things across its stories.
4Laughs from character, with heart earned underneath
The biggest laughs show who a character is instead of telling a joke. The pilot's Lion King moment replaced a talky first-draft scene with something that revealed character, and when the full pilot played at the upfronts it drew an eruption of laughter and applause.
Levitan says setup-and-punchline jokes now feel 1960s and 1970s, while well-crafted ones like Frasier's still hold up. Phil worrying that Lily will be hard to say is another character beat rather than a gag.
Use twists that flip a character from top to bottom in one beat. Mitch and Cam, always picked last, feel in demand for a private school spot until a rival couple walks in: a lesbian with a black baby and a partner in a wheelchair. Levitan calls it the royal flush.
He says a twist keeps the viewer asking what happens next, and a forced joke takes them out of the moment.
Keep emotional moments understated so they sneak up on viewers. Jay quietly takes Manny to Disneyland after Manny's dad cancels, without saying I love you. Levitan's model is the Taxi scene where Louie's pain is revealed, then he grabs Elaine's backside: laugh, feeling, laugh again.
He favors a small touch that brings "a sense of hope," and accepts endings that are not logical as long as they feel like real life.
5Two showrunners, one tone
Two creators with no tiebreaker alternated who won each week. Levitan and Lloyd each oversaw half the episodes; whoever led that week won disputes, since there are no right answers and arguing could take an hour. While Lloyd shot his episode, Levitan's group rewrote and broke stories, and staff moved between them.
Their tastes differed: Levitan favored the extremely real and natural, Lloyd clever setups that pay off later, so writers followed whoever led that week.
Tone is set by thousands of small yes-or-no notes. Levitan's notes were small: "that feels too jokey," a choice makes a character unlikable. He says the most important quality in a second in command is sharing your tone.
He cites Tom Ford building his brand on a hundred thousand yes-or-no decisions.
Decide fast in the room and fix mistakes later. In debates Levitan told the room "I may not be right but we have to make a decision," and that if wrong they would fix it.
He credits years as a TV reporter, going on air two minutes after a scene and writing for the six o'clock news, for his fast-twitch pace, though he values one slow, deliberate voice in the room.
6Fitting three or four stories into 21:30
Ten characters and several stories required careful weaving and economy. An episode ran 21:30 with a 10-second title, so each of three or four stories got seven or eight minutes, and all ten characters needed something to do and a point of view.
A story spanning a week would not fit one needing two days, so one was saved or stretched; Levitan calls it "TV rocket science." Talking heads were shot as couples to keep the focus on dynamics.
Later episodes got frenetic, so Levitan pushed for less story. He felt later seasons crammed in too much and kept saying "let it breathe," wanting room to settle into real conversation.
7The FaceTime episode
Levitan took on hard formats to keep the work fresh. Inspired by a FaceTime call with his daughter, the episode put a third of its story on a computer screen, built around a lost-phone panic.
A short film told entirely on screen convinced him it was possible. Every screen detail and background joke had to be written into the script, so he co-wrote it with Megan Gans, who also geeks out on such details.
How to Write Freakishly Fast — Steven Levitan
It grew out of Levitan and Lloyd swapping real weekend stories, then six weeks spent only on character dynamics. Episodes ran 21:30 with three or four stories and ten characters, and the full pilot was shown at the upfronts, where the Lion King moment drew laughter and applause.
The show began as real weekend stories the two creators swapped. Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd traded stories about their weekends on Monday mornings and realized those were more compelling than the other show idea they were developing.
Levitan says they were "constantly stealing from our wives and kids." Jay's house and the circle where Jay teaches Gloria to ride a bike were real spots near Levitan's home, where he taught his own kids.
Writers captured family dialogue as it happened and used it verbatim. Levitan typed his kids' kitchen-table fights into his phone, and Alex and Haley's staircase fight used their actual lines. His kids stared at him when it aired.
Breakup advice he gave his son went badly and became an Alex story, which his son disliked seeing on TV. A borrowed boy's name worried his daughter that people would think she had a crush. His first test for any scene is "does it feel real? ... are they talking the way people talk?"
They picked how families had changed as the show's reason to exist. No family show spoke to families of the day after Raymond ended, so they built in a gay couple raising a kid, an immigrant cross-cultural and cross-generational family, and the way smartphones changed family life.
Levitan's own tech obsession fed stories, given to the nerdy characters, such as Phil appearing on a rolling iPad robot. Setting it in LA meant no hiding palm trees or license plates.
Give every pair of characters a tension so their relationship crackles. Levitan calls it "two points in a line": like Oscar the messy and Felix the neat, each added character gets a tense line to every other one, like bicycle spokes. He and Lloyd spent about six weeks talking only about the characters and their dynamics.
The goal is to know what would be funny about any two of them stuck in an elevator before writing. He says a premise alone gets old but dynamics can play "for hopefully hundreds of episodes."
Treat the story as the hard part; the script follows. Levitan tells the joke of the screenwriter who finishes the outline and says he is 90% done, and says his room felt the same: once a story works, the draft is easy.
Some stories broke fast; others left the room with five days and nothing. When stuck, he advises working on something else, because "creativity is connections."
Each season opened with eight to ten weeks of story breaking. Starting June 1, the room asked "what if" and built mostly episodic stories one at a time, with occasional arcs like Mitch and Cam's wedding or Gloria's baby. Levitan said it felt like math word problems all day and left his brain throbbing.
In season, Monday and Tuesday were the rewrite with six or seven writers while the other half broke future stories, a table read came at Wednesday lunch, and the rewrite was due Friday for a Monday shoot, on top of production meetings and editing.
Pick one theme per episode and make every story feed it. Levitan wants to know what an episode is trying to say, ideally from the start. An episode called 15% asked whether people can change, answering maybe, by 15%, and that can be enough.
Caught in the Act used its title phrase to mean several things across its stories.
The biggest laughs show who a character is instead of telling a joke. The pilot's Lion King moment replaced a talky first-draft scene with something that revealed character, and when the full pilot played at the upfronts it drew an eruption of laughter and applause.
Levitan says setup-and-punchline jokes now feel 1960s and 1970s, while well-crafted ones like Frasier's still hold up. Phil worrying that Lily will be hard to say is another character beat rather than a gag.
Use twists that flip a character from top to bottom in one beat. Mitch and Cam, always picked last, feel in demand for a private school spot until a rival couple walks in: a lesbian with a black baby and a partner in a wheelchair. Levitan calls it the royal flush.
He says a twist keeps the viewer asking what happens next, and a forced joke takes them out of the moment.
Keep emotional moments understated so they sneak up on viewers. Jay quietly takes Manny to Disneyland after Manny's dad cancels, without saying I love you. Levitan's model is the Taxi scene where Louie's pain is revealed, then he grabs Elaine's backside: laugh, feeling, laugh again.
He favors a small touch that brings "a sense of hope," and accepts endings that are not logical as long as they feel like real life.
Two creators with no tiebreaker alternated who won each week. Levitan and Lloyd each oversaw half the episodes; whoever led that week won disputes, since there are no right answers and arguing could take an hour. While Lloyd shot his episode, Levitan's group rewrote and broke stories, and staff moved between them.
Their tastes differed: Levitan favored the extremely real and natural, Lloyd clever setups that pay off later, so writers followed whoever led that week.
Tone is set by thousands of small yes-or-no notes. Levitan's notes were small: "that feels too jokey," a choice makes a character unlikable. He says the most important quality in a second in command is sharing your tone.
He cites Tom Ford building his brand on a hundred thousand yes-or-no decisions.
Decide fast in the room and fix mistakes later. In debates Levitan told the room "I may not be right but we have to make a decision," and that if wrong they would fix it.
He credits years as a TV reporter, going on air two minutes after a scene and writing for the six o'clock news, for his fast-twitch pace, though he values one slow, deliberate voice in the room.
Ten characters and several stories required careful weaving and economy. An episode ran 21:30 with a 10-second title, so each of three or four stories got seven or eight minutes, and all ten characters needed something to do and a point of view.
A story spanning a week would not fit one needing two days, so one was saved or stretched; Levitan calls it "TV rocket science." Talking heads were shot as couples to keep the focus on dynamics.
Later episodes got frenetic, so Levitan pushed for less story. He felt later seasons crammed in too much and kept saying "let it breathe," wanting room to settle into real conversation.
Levitan took on hard formats to keep the work fresh. Inspired by a FaceTime call with his daughter, the episode put a third of its story on a computer screen, built around a lost-phone panic.
A short film told entirely on screen convinced him it was possible. Every screen detail and background joke had to be written into the script, so he co-wrote it with Megan Gans, who also geeks out on such details.
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