A lot of prep work and stress goes into planning a family vacation. The same thing happens with a TV family. During preproduction for season 3, the word on where to vacation came down from above: dude ranch.
WALSH (writer / executive producer): We thought instead of writing the travel episode at the end of the season, let’s write it at the beginning. We’ll have more time to dedicate to it and we can really get it right. What happened instead was we spent six weeks over the summer debating whether it should be a half hour or an hour.
MORTON (executive producer): Steve wanted to do an hour episode, and Chris only wanted a half hour.
LLOYD (cocreator): I was open to an hour, but we needed to follow the same rules we always do, which is every scene needs to build on what happened in the one before.
LEVITAN (cocreator): Think about great westerns. You can afford to take some time with long streaking shots that take you into a scene and let it breathe. It was so unbelievably beautiful there that everywhere you shot looked good. And that was great.
LLOYD (cocreator): To watch them ride over a mountaintop into a sunset because it would be cool to see isn’t good storytelling. That’s letting the location dictate what we’re doing. And that’s not what should be happening. The location should be secondary. We’re in the “Bradys go to Hawaii” territory then.
WALSH (writer / executive producer): It became tense because the clock was ticking. It was time we should have spent breaking other episodes.
O’SHANNON (writer / executive producer): The show was a half an hour and then an hour and then a half hour and then an hour. Do that twenty times. It was a war, and Brad, Paul, and I were in the middle of it.
WINER (director / executive producer): Chris’s point was that he had never, ever seen a half-hour comedy successfully expand to an hour. Two back-to-back half hours, sure, if they aired them that way. I think Steve was coming at it from the point of, “Let’s break new ground.”
HIGGINBOTHAM (writer / executive producer): We would take a vote. We’d think it was done and then it would come back up again. “Well, here’s why I think maybe we should revisit this,” and you’d be like, “I thought we were done.”
Flat 301 couldn’t go anywhere until the issue got resolved.
MORTON (executive producer): Finally I go, “This is crazy. We need a decision because we can’t plan it all out.” I went up to the writers’ room and said, “Guys, we’re going to solve this.” Two hours later, there was still no decision, just intransigence. I started to understand how frustrated the writers were getting.
O’SHANNON (writer / executive producer): It would have made a perfect forty-five-minute episode, because there was some good stuff that got cut and then some of it was a little rushed. But then on the other hand, it might have dragged if it had been an hour so …
RICHMAN (writer / executive producer): Brad, Paul, and Dan had to write a forty-five-minute draft that was in the middle to see if there was enough story for an hour.
LLOYD (cocreator): After giving it a fair try, we couldn’t come up with a way to make it an hour. And it’s a shame because it would have made the cost of doing that episode easier to bear. But the decision was we tell the best stories we can tell on the show even if they are costly. So that’s what we did.
LEVITAN (cocreator): We would have had to add another story or beats to it to fill out the time, but I maintain it would have been a better one-hour episode. Instead we cut the heck out of it to fit everything in. I don’t think it was the right call. But we’ll debate that until the end of time.
LLOYD (cocreator): It was not the first nor the last protracted disagreement between Steve and me and not the first or last that it came down to ideas about storytelling.
While the writers worked on the script and the parents quarreled, Morton, the wizard behind the curtain for travel episodes, put feelers out for a usable dude ranch with easy access for a production crew. They looked in Northern California and Colorado, but logistics negated them all. Then they got a new lead—Lost Creek Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
YOUNG (production manager / producer): My sister had run the chamber of commerce for some time in Jackson Hole. She did a lot of research for us and found a high-end dude ranch that was interested because they were fans of the show.
Once production kicked into gear, the cast flew in. They got a hero’s welcome.
YOUNG (production manager / producer): No one had seen the new Lily yet, so when she got off the plane, they put her on top of a horse of the mounted police right there on the tarmac. They had a marching band, and a little affiliate TV station in Idaho came in to cover it.
Morton had set everybody up in condos at the Snow King Resort. Just outside the hotel, you could ride the Alpine Slide, in which you could zip a cart down the side of a mountain, 2,500 feet’s worth of track.
GOULD (Luke Dunphy): It was a land luge, a cart you sit in with handles you push forward and go on this big track. Whenever we weren’t working, we were racing each other.
To get to the ranch required a caravan of vans and a forty-five-minute ride every morning and end of day.
MORTON (executive producer): It was a bumpy ride to the ranch. One day, Reid wasn’t supposed to be working until about two in the afternoon. At seven in the morning, we’re in a van starting to go down the street, and we look back and Reid’s running alongside the van. So we stop and go, “Hey, Reid, what’s up?” And he says, “I wanted to see if I could get a ride.” We said, “But you’re not shooting until two o’clock,” and he says, “I mean, who wants to miss those pancakes? Am I right?”
REID EWING (Dylan Marshall): I’m always running somewhere for some weird reason, chasing after something. I wanted breakfast and to be on set and enjoy the atmosphere. Getting to travel for work is one of the best parts of being an actor.
Tim Blake Nelson guest-starred as a cowboy named Hank, their guide at the ranch.
GREENBERG (casting director): We made offers to John C. Reilly, Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Josh Holloway, Kevin Bacon, and Thomas Haden Church. They read the script, then passed. We wanted to make an offer to people including Sam Rockwell, Owen Wilson, George Clooney, and Mark Wahlberg, but were told they wouldn’t be interested.
WINER (director / executive producer): Tim was the perfect choice for that character.
MITCHELL INTERVIEW
MITCHELL
I realized if we were going to raise a boy, I needed to butch up my life. I want to be able to teach my son all the things my dad taught Claire.
ZUKER (writer / executive producer): I’m not sure if this inspired what we were doing, but when I found out we were going to have a son, I had a friend, who’s a jock, teach me how to throw a football. I’m not an athletic guy. My dad never threw a ball with me. So I had a friend take me to the beach to practice for my son. I think that was an element of Mitch trying to butch it up.
To that end, in a later scene, Mitchell and Luke blow up a birdhouse with a firecracker.
EXT. DUDE RANCH—DAY
Mitchell runs up to Cameron and Lily.
MITCHELL
I did a boy thing! I blew up the birdhouse!
ZUKER (writer / executive producer): I’ve said for years that it doesn’t matter what kind of man you are—Gandhi, Tommy Tune, or the Rock—men like blowing shit up.
By this point, Haley had gotten together and broken up with Dylan multiple times. Jackson Hole became something bigger. Dylan got left behind permanently.
EWING (Dylan Marshall): I was really sad when Haley broke up with me in season 1. I was really sad when we broke up at the end of season 2. After that, I was like, “If you guys want to use me, great, and if you don’t, don’t.” It’s their thing and not mine. I have no right to tell them how to do their job.
CORRIGAN (writer / executive producer): At the time, we thought dumping Dylan was smart. We’d had him on the show for two years and didn’t know quite what else to do or new wrinkles he would bring. We thought it was a funny way to say goodbye.
O’SHANNON (writer / executive producer): I put one joke in where Dylan says to Claire, “You want me to leave?” and she says, “No, it’s actually the opposite,” and Dylan says, “I want you to leave?” We couldn’t help it. We were piling on these dumb jokes because they cracked us up.
HIGGINBOTHAM (writer / executive producer): They were in the forest and Dylan says, “I’ve never been this far from home before.” Then he would take a step and go, “Now I’ve never been this far.” And he would take another step … I was like, “That’s funny, but he’s concussed. Something is wrong with him.”
CORRIGAN (writer / executive producer): The other joke was when they find Dylan in the woods and Haley yells, “Where are you?” and he replies, “Wyoming.” I had the pleasure of pitching both of those and then for years hearing how horrible they were.
Alex got her first kiss in the episode.
WINTER (Alex Dunphy): People tease you in a good way because you’re having that kiss. It was really funny and nice that I was part of the cast in that way that I got the teasing.
WALSH (writer / executive producer): People internally didn’t love the Alex boyfriend character. And I understand some of the criticism. It’s one of the hazards of travel shows, because you have to make compromises. Internally, it was never a favorite.
WINTER (Alex Dunphy): It was not my first kiss. In some interviews, I was told to say it was my first kiss, but in honesty, it wasn’t.
During off-hours, cast and crew mingled together, taking in the local nightlife.
VERGARA (Gloria Delgado-Pritchett): We always try to do things because when we’re in LA, we don’t see each other as much. When you’re on a trip, we make the effort to try to do everything together as much as we can.
CORRIGAN (writer / executive producer): I remember walking around Jackson Hole with the cast, shocking people out in the world seeing the Modern Family family together as if they were a real family. It was fun to experience that through their eyes. Of course, sometimes you see a celebrity, but seeing the actor act like their character in the real world is surreal.
HENSZ (director / assistant director): There was a real big night in downtown Jackson Hole where the cast and crew all went out country western dancing at the local bar.
LEVITAN (cocreator): It was beautiful. People really liked the area and going out at night to this country western town and country bars. A bunch of people bought western clothes and cowboy hats.
CORRIGAN (writer / executive producer): One night, we were at a restaurant and they handed us the dessert menu. Ty saw something on the menu called sweet corn crème brûlée. It sounded like a fantastic exclamation for Phil. I think he wound up using it in an episode once.
BURRELL (Phil Dunphy): The amount of ridiculous things said in screams on our show boggles the mind.
BOWEN (Claire Dunphy): I remember giving Ty a bear-fur jockstrap because they sold them there and I thought that was pretty funny.
BURRELL (Phil Dunphy): That was for future sex scenes. I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere.
When on a dude ranch, you have to do the outdoors.
HENSZ (director / assistant director): There was the whole horseback riding sequence. Anytime you put a bunch of non–horseback-rider actors on horses, there’s a little bit of tension there and it’s less controllable.
VERGARA (Gloria Delgado-Pritchett): Eric didn’t like the horseback riding. I don’t think he had ever done it. But he did a pretty good job once he got on the horse. It’s hard. It’s a scary thing. I grew up riding horses, so I was super comfortable and having the best time.
STONESTREET (Cam Tucker): I remember seeing all the horses being brought out for everyone and then seeing mine. Mine was like a draft horse. Others were smaller and I thought, “Good. I don’t want to hurt any horses in the making of this TV show.”
AUBREY ANDERSON-EMMONS (Lily Tucker-Pritchett): Everybody got to ride horses. I’ve been riding horses since I was little, but they wouldn’t let me because I wasn’t old enough. So I started crying.
The production crew had their own adventures in the great outdoors.
JOSH ELLIOTT (on-set dresser): Our trucks were far away, and I had to run back to it. It took forever. On the way back once, I decided to take a shortcut over the fence and into a non-maintained field to the other side and hop the fence. Well, Little Red Riding Hood left the path. I got halfway there, and I hear, “Halt!” I stopped and turned around. And there’s a ranger there. He says, “Don’t move.” I asked what’s going on, and he says, “Sssssshhhhh.” He pointed down. I saw dirt coming out of the earth. He told me to back up very slowly. I got about five feet away from a badger. When he backed out of the hole, he was about two feet wide and a foot thick and looked like three feet long. He was not attractive, and he was pissed. So I screamed and ran away like a little girl and went the long way.
WALSH (director / executive producer): Those travel episodes in general are more crowd-pleasers than writers-pleasers. They’re light by nature. I hear about them a lot from civilians, but internally, it’s never what the writers are talking about.
In terms of vacations, Jackson Hole ranks as one of the best for cast and crew. The next one, also in season 3, proved more magical, however—a Magic Kingdom, in fact.