Christopher Lloyd builds comedy by structure: a misunderstanding that grows by logic, a reveal held to the last minute, a joke that trusts the audience to keep up. Frasier shows how good that can be; Modern Family shows what happens when it runs too long.
Fi1m perspective
The pilot of Modern Family (2009) holds one piece of information back until its last few minutes, and we will not say what it is, only that the whole half-hour has been quietly arranged around it. That is a Christopher Lloyd move. He had spent the previous decade doing it weekly on Frasier, where a small disagreement grows by strict logic until everyone in the room is involved, and the payoff is timed to the second. He builds a half-hour the way other people build clocks.
He started on The Golden Girls in 1986, wrote for Wings, and then ran Frasier from 1993 to 2004, in a writers' room that also included Joe Keenan and his own father, David Lloyd. The scripts there work exactly as our review describes: a correction prompts an objection, which demands another correction, and the elaborate language is funny because the want underneath it is ordinary. Frasier wants to be right and wants to be liked while being right. Lloyd's rule was that a joke only a tenth of the audience would catch was still worth writing, and that trust in the viewer is the best thing about the show. A screenplay for the animated Flushed Away (2006) and two shorter sitcoms, Out of Practice and Back to You, came before the second big one.
With Steven Levitan he took the mockumentary form The Office had made familiar and quietly removed the documentary. The Dunphys and Pritchetts talk straight to camera, but nobody ever asks who is filming or why, which saves a great deal of tiresome business. The first three seasons are sharply written and cast almost without a weak link, and Ty Burrell's Phil Dunphy, in the checked shirt of a man who is trying, is one of the great television fathers. There are eight more seasons after that, 250 episodes in all, and they mostly repeat the jokes. Somewhere in the middle of the run we noticed we were laughing at the memory of a line rather than the line, because the show had learned which beats got a reaction and kept reaching for them, and we felt slightly disloyal about it, since the cast were doing precisely what they had been asked to do.
That is the criticism, and it is present in the good show as well as the long one. Frasier's misunderstandings sometimes drag on past the last good joke; on Modern Family the dragging became the format. Lloyd knows how to build a scene, and he is less sure when to leave one. His own account of a hit is short: "Do everything right, and then get lucky 10 ways." Doing everything right is the part he can be held to, and he mostly does it. Start with Frasier, take the first three seasons of Modern Family, and treat the rest as something to have on while you are doing something else.
Biography
Christopher Lloyd is an American television producer and screenwriter. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, he began his career writing for the first four seasons of The Golden Girls (1985). He went on to write for Wings before joining Frasier (1993) as a writer and later becoming its showrunner.
Lloyd co-created and served as executive producer of Modern Family (2009) with Steven Levitan. He also wrote the screenplay for the animated film Flushed Away (2006). His other producing credits include Out of Practice and Back to You.
He has won 12 Primetime Emmy Awards, primarily for his work on Frasier and Modern Family, and holds the record for the most such awards as a comedy or drama series producer. He is the son of sitcom writer David Lloyd.
