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It was the end of January 2021. Modern Family‘s long-rumored Mitch & Cam spinoff was on the verge of a green light. Instead, it got a pass.
Years later, star Eric Stonestreet calls that decision by ABC “a little hurtful” and believes the offshoot would’ve been a “slam dunk” and, if picked up, still be on the air right now.
Co-written by Modern Family co-creator/executive producer Christopher Lloyd and longtime executive producers Paul Corrigan and Brad Walsh, the proposed spinoff was to chronicle Mitch (Jesse Tylor Ferguson) and Cam (Stonestreet)’s new life with their kids in Missouri.
“Chris Lloyd and a couple of the writers wrote a really great script that spun Jesse and I off in our life in Missouri, and they said ‘no’. They just said, ‘We don’t want to do it,” Stonestreet said in an interview with Graham Bensinger. “And I think it hurt Jesse and I’s feelings. I think it hurt Chris Lloyd’s feelings.”
The idea for a Mitch and Cam spinoff series set in Cam’s home state of Missouri had been bandied about for months when the Modern Family April 2020 finale further fueled speculation by sending the pair and their kids there after Cam got a dream coaching job.
“It does present a possibility for us” to do a spinoff, Lloyd told Deadline after the finale about the decision to have Mitch, Cam and the kids move to Missouri. “Will that happen? I’m not sure but we would be probably dumb to not explore it,” he said at the time.
And they did, with the studio behind Modern Family, 20th Television, going all in on the idea, commissioning a script and reaching out to Ferguson and Stonestreet — all that without having a network commitment. After months of negotiations, the two actors agreed to come on board in early January 2021, with Stonestreet’s deal taking longer to close. With the duo locked in, the script was delivered to ABC.
It arrived a couple of weeks after a major Disney executive restructuring that saw Hulu’s Head of Originals Craig Erwich adding oversight of ABC Entertainment. Meanwhile, his predecessor at ABC, Karey Burke, who had been very keen on exploring a Modern Family spinoff, took the reins of Modern Family studio 20th TV.
In one of his first major programming decisions, Erwich passed on the Mitch & Cam script. According to sources, the internal consensus was that the followup didn’t quite measure up to the original. There were also some concerns at the time that the setup of the spinoff lacked diversity.
“I think Jesse and I felt like they thought of us as the old guys, or something like that, that didn’t seem worthy of keeping those characters going,” Stonestreet said in the same interview. “It just felt a little hurtful. But people make business decisions… I’m not the one getting fired. If they do a Modern Family spin off and it fails; those are TV executives that have to make those decisions, and I get it.”
Still, “I think it would have been a slam dunk, I don’t think it would have not been successful, because you had one of the creators who had really taken such great care of making sure that show was great for so long, willing to do it. It wasn’t like two ancillary writers that were just being like, Hey, we’re looking for a money grab here, and want to do a spinoff, and if it lasts a year, whatever, we made a couple of hundred thousand dollars.”
Along with Lloyd and fellow co-creator/executive producer/co-showrunner Steve Levitan, Corrigan and Walsh worked on Modern Family for the show’s entire 11-season run, most of their tenure was as executive producers.
The duo also was behind the proposed Modern Family spinoff starring Rob Riggle, which was in consideration during the 2013-14 season but also did not get a green light.
