'Modern Family' Season 7, Episode 10 Recap: Gloria and Jay host an interesting playdate [Spoilers]
Spoiler Alert! This article contains spoilers for "Modern Family," Season 7, Episode 10: "Playdates."
In this week’s brand new episode of “Modern Family” Season 7, titled “Playdates,” the members of the extended Pritchett-Tucker-Dunphy clan spend time with some new sets of friends. Mitch and the Dunphy kids meet a Hollywood actor while Phil and Claire reunite with a fabulous couple they met on vacation. Meanwhile, Gloria sets up a playdate with a couple from Joe’s school.
Mitchell Pritchett (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) decides to cash in on a birthday fun day coupon he received from the Dunphy kids. Haley (Sarah Hyland), Alex (Ariel Winter) and Luke (Nolan Gould) are caught by surprise. They haven’t prepared anything, but they feel like they owe it to Mitch because he’s been a fabulous uncle. He is always the first to greet them and gives them great presents on their birthdays.
The kids blindfold Mitch and pretend to drive off to a surprise destination. While trying to figure out what to do, they spot a man selling Hollywood star maps. They spot Barbara Streisand’s house in the map and decide to take Mitch there, knowing that he’s a big fan. When they get there, they spot actor Ray Liotta watering the plants. It turns out that Streisand has moved many years ago, and Liotta is the current owner.
Liotta hears them out and is touched by how hard the kids are trying. He offers to take them to Streisand’s current home since he’s dropping off her mail anyway. When they get there, Liotta tries to introduce Mitch but she couldn’t be bothered to step out and only speaks to them briefly on the intercom. Nevertheless, Mitch is thrilled, and decides to remember his own, positive version of the story.
While Mitch is busy hanging out with the Dunphy children, his husband, Cam (Eric Stonestreet), and their daughter Lily (Aubrey Anderson-Emmons) are entertaining a Canadian family renting the upstairs apartment. Cam notices that Lily seems to have a crush on the couple’s son, Monty. He tries to coach Lily on how to act around her first crush.
Cam then invites the family over for dinner. To his surprise, he sees Lily using the moves he taught her. Unfortunately, she’s using it on the dad, not on Monty. Cam draws her aside, and they clear out the misunderstanding. Cam says that she should not be making moves on a grown man and recalls his own disastrous first crush story, which involves a bronze statue.
Meanwhile, Phil (Ty Burrell) and Claire Dunphy’s (Julie Bowen) day isn’t going as well. They meet up with Tom and Lisa Delaney, the lovely couple that they met while on a Cabo vacation. Claire has observed that even though the couple is very rich, they have not picked up the check in the last three times that they have met since Cabo.
She tells Phil to refrain from picking up the tab. She thinks that Phil may be trying to prove something because he feels insecure from Tom’s success. He explains that he simply feels uncomfortable with the unpaid bill just lying on the table.
Once the bill finally arrives, Claire does everything that she could to keep Phil from picking it up. It sits on the table for a very long time, and Tom clearly has no intention of paying. Eventually, things reach an uncomfortable breaking point. Lisa and Claire both speak up at the same time. Lisa thinks it’s rude of her husband to not pick up the tab. Claire agrees, but the women are in for a surprise.
Things escalate when the men admit that Tom won a bet against Phil in Cabo. This is the reason he owes Tom five meals. Things get even worse when the wives find out that their husbands had been sneaking crickets into their food. Whoever got his wife to eat more crickets, wins. The women are disgusted and angry, and they both walk out with a warning about the food that they will prepare for their husbands in the future.
Over at the Delgado-Pritchett household, Gloria (Sofia Vergara) has set up their own playdate. She invited one of Joe’s classmates, Wesley, to come over to play. She and the mom have gotten close, and she thinks that she and Jay (Ed O’Neill) have a lot in common with the other couple.
Jay reluctantly agrees, and he gets very offended when he sees what “a lot in common” means. The other couple also has a large age gap but the husband is in his 80s. Jay refuses to be lumped in the same category, thinking that they are in completely different generations. Things get worse when the other guy keeps insisting that they know the same things and keeps implying that they are of the same age group.
Gloria confronts Jay, and tells him to be nice. She says that she and the other mom happen to be the oldest women in Joe’s age group at school. She has found comfort in the friendship and tells Jay to be nice to the couple so she can stay friends with the mom. Jay agrees to make an effort and eases down on the scathing comments. Surprisingly, it turns out that the older guy is actually more tech savvy than he is.
Follow the hilarious new episodes of “Modern Family” Season 7 every Wednesday at 9:30 pm ET on ABC.