'Modern Family' Season 7, Episode 5 Recap: The Verdict

In this week’s episode of “Modern Family,” Gloria Delgado-Pritchett (Sofia Vergara) gets called up for jury duty and her husband, Jay (Ed O'Neill), ends up volunteering at their son’s pre-school. Gloria’s absence sets into motion a series of hilarious situations where the adults in the family learn life lessons from their children.

Gloria is a newly-minted US citizen, and she’s excited for her chance to serve in a jury. This prompted her to leave Jay to take over the volunteer work that she does at their son's, Joe, preschool.

Jay tries to help in his own way but he’s clearly not built for the job. He ends up offending a child who called him old. He thinks the whole day is a bust until his son says that he enjoys having his dad around. Jay is surprised but is touched by Joe’s comment. He agrees to return but things don’t get any better.

Meanwhile, Jay asks his daughter, Claire Dunphy (Julie Bowen), to take over for him at work. She works with him at his closet company, and she’s thrilled to have the opportunity to fill in for the big boss. She decides to bring her daughters Haley (Sarah Hyland) and Alex (Ariel Winter) to work, so she can show off and teach them a few things about her job.

Unfortunately, filling in for Jay isn’t as easy as Claire thinks. Even if it seems like all he does is read the newspaper all day, she soon learns that everyone in the office relies on him for so much. They all come to him for the smallest to the biggest decisions in the day-to-day operations.

When she tries to make decisions in his place, things start to fall apart and it snowballs into a big disaster. Instead of being impressed, Alex and Haley become witness to a total trainwreck. However, they tell their mom that she doesn’t have to try so hard to impress anyone because as her kids, they spent all their lives bearing witness to how strong she is and how good she is at handling all kinds of situations.

While Claire is at work with the girls, her husband Phil (Ty Burrell), takes their son, Luke (Nolan Gould), to mandatory community service with his class. A guy comes up to Phil and starts talking to him. Phil doesn’t remember him but is too polite to admit it. He pretends to remember the guy and makes small talk. When he borrows money saying that he had some car trouble, Luke points out that the guy is a scammer.

Phil refuses to accept that he’s been scammed by a con artist and tries to prove it. However, when they see the guy talking to someone else on the street, Phil is forced to accept that the stranger really lied about knowing him.

They dump the garbage that they collected into the guy’s car. When the guy returns, Phil confronts him about the scam. Unfortunately for Phil, he gets mortified when the guy says that they really know each other. He turns out to be the doctor who attended to Luke's birth.

Elsewhere, Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) are at odds about inviting a friend to a party they are throwing. Their old friend Raymond broke up with his boyfriend months ago. As a result, Raymond ended up getting left out of gatherings. His ex kept all the friends and poor Raymond became the outcast.

Gloria tries to mediate and Mitch eventually admits that he want to invite Raymond because he feels sorry for him. He thinks that Cam will keep all their friends if they ever break up. When Gloria pushes him to speak up further, he changes his tune and says maybe Cam will become the outcast. They start to argue and Gloria just decides to invite the guy to get the whole situation sorted.

More hilarious episodes of “Modern Family” air every Wednesday at 9:00 pm ET on ABC. The series airs in Australia on Channel Ten.

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