Modern Family Review: “Las Vegas” (Season 5, Episode 18)

It also helps that the episode booked a third strong guest star, Stephen Merchant, who plays the enjoyably prissy butler Leslie Higgins, at the family’s disposal during their stay on an elite floor. Leslie loves to promote the decadent baths to his guests and it is funny to see the characters react to these totally tubular tub tweaks. Merchant, a king of deadpan humour, uses his sweet, yet skeptical facial expressions as a key point of his performance. At one point, he hilariously mistakes Phil’s magic kit, complete with handcuffs and a whip, as S&M toys.

However, what rockets this half-hour past the average standards for a Modern Family episode is the madcap pacing of the last ten minutes. This extended comic sequence takes place entirely on the 62nd floor (the Excelsior level of the hotel) as it maneuvers between and through the adjoining rooms of the three couples for some zany misdirection, misunderstandings and double entendres.

Although many shows would introduce with a visual cue near the top of the episode who is staying in which room, director Gail Mancuso wisely does not show how the rooms are connected. This choice makes the affairs of the last act more dizzying. When a character walks into a room, we are not quite sure what they are going to see, since we are not accustomed to whose room we are entering. It just makes the pacing even quicker and the situations even harder to predict.

The three potent guest stars help keep the up-tempo, unpredictable plotting move well. Beyond the bubbly Armisen and the naïve, deadpan Merchant, Oswalt is a dry delight as the bemused head of the secret magic club Phil wants to impress. I was hoping for a reference to Delmar Darion, but there was immense delight in seeing a framed book cover to Carter Beats the Devil on his wall.

In Phil’s trick for Ducky, a quick-change bit he calls “Metamorphosis,” he narrates to his audience that he will “Endeavour to prove that some change is glacial and some change is instantaneous.” That statement may just as well apply to Modern Family. While the characters on the sitcom are tropes often unwilling to leave their foundations, there is delight – dare I say some magic – when you put them into endearingly wacky situations, like in the latter half of this episode, which is filled with quick-changes. Magicians may not run Las Vegas, as Ducky jokes, but the writers of this four-time Emmy winner are unleashing enough comic magic to keep us dazzled and delighted, week after week.