Modern Family opened its fifth season with a gay marriage
proposal.
On Wednesday's premiere episode, the show's gay dads, Mitchell
Pritchett (played by openly gay Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron
Tucker (Eric Stonestreet), got engaged.
The inspiration behind marrying the couple came from the fall of
Proposition 8, California's constitutional amendment approved by
voters in 2008 which limited marriage to heterosexual couples.
“We hadn't really talked about Mitch and Cam getting married
until DOMA and Prop 8 came onto our radar when we got back to work in
the middle of May,” Jeffrey Richman, one of the comedy's two openly
gay writer-producers, told The
Hollywood Reporter. “We don't usually do
California-centric stories – and while we don't really identify
where the characters live, we knew we weren't going to send them to
another state to get married and they weren't going to have a fake
commitment ceremony. We'd avoided that for four seasons. Mitch and
Cam have been in a relationship for eight years, they already are a
family and they have a daughter, so there needed to be a reason for
them to get married. This became the 'why now.'”
“As I started writing, I became unexpectedly emotional. I
teared up writing it. I teared up hearing it read. And I completely
teared up seeing that moment when they both just say 'yes' at the
exact same time.”