After 11 seasons and many, many Emmy wins, Modern Family is ending. Like, really ending. The final season of the ABC comedy premiered on Wednesday, September 25. But, if you’re already looking ahead to when the final episode of Modern Family will air, you still have quite some time. This isn’t a situation where the final season is a super short one, as is the case with some ending series. Modern Family is ending on its own terms.
In May, Modern Family co-creator Steve Levitan, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the final season and said that, at that time, the plan was for it to be 18 episodes long. “[Co-creator and co-showrunner] Chris Lloyd and I have agreed to do 18 episodes [next] season,” Levitan told THR, “but this is an ongoing conversation, and if it makes sense creatively to do more, we’re possibly open to that. Our number one focus is to end strong with a great finale.
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Seasons 1 through 6 of Modern Family were 24 episodes, and seasons 7 through 10 were 22 episodes. So, 18 would be slightly shorter, but not so short that the show would get a winter finale instead of a spring one. Past seasons of Modern Family have all ended in May, and there’s a chance that will happen again, as May is a common time for network season finales to air. But, this also will depend on how long of a winter break the show takes. An extended break would mean the show could still end in May. On the other side of things, if it doesn’t have a longer hiatus than normal, it would end sooner; episode 18 of the previous seasons aired in March or April.
Basically, you’ll be getting that series finale sometime in the spring, there are just some still unknown factors that will contribute to the scheduling of the final episode.
Until then, there’s still a lot to look forward to for fans of the show. For starters, the eleventh season will see Haley (Sarah Hyland) and Dylan (Reid Ewing) raising their twins, who were born at the end of the previous season.
“We will keep [Haley] working so that it's not easy and everybody has to help out a little bit,” the producer said. “So that's a good place to start, that there's going to be literally some new life into that [Dunphy] house. We have a couple of other ideas for the other two households as well.”
Aside from the new babies joining the family, Levitan feels confident that there is still plenty to explore with the other characters. Prior to the show being renewed for the eleventh season, he told Entertainment Weekly, “My biggest priority is: If we go forward, do we have something left to say, do we have things left to explore with these characters? And so far, every year we manage to find something, so I have no reason to think that we won’t … If we do go forward, it’ll have to be everybody looking each other in the eye and saying, ‘Okay, we’ve got another good season in us — not just another season.’”