Did anyone else think it was Bob Odenkirk in the picture at first, or can I just no longer discern faces?

"You hit me! With a woman's hand! You Midwestern floozy!"
"I LIVED IN NEW YORK!"

No way, Frankie is pure Greendale. A straight-laced-to-a-fault woman who is, just below the surface, clearly dying to fit in and discover her wacky side? That's a Human Being if I've ever seen one.

Don't get me wrong, I love them when they work, and think that they have been some of the show's best episodes. I just think a couple of them per season would be ideal. Eventually they can start to feel gimmicky and hold back the more character driven episodes (except for when they have great character development…

I'm loving, loving, loving this season, so much more than I expected to. Paget Brewster and Keith David fit in perfectly, and watching the new group riff together both feels like old times and manages to be new and interesting. Best of all, after that unfortunate pants pooping incident, the correctly written, awesome…

This was my favorite of the three so far. The new cast is really starting to gel, and Frankie is on her way to becoming my favorite character. "Hope…point!"

Wow, I missed that completely. Maybe watching in the middle of the night wasn't the best idea.

I liked it, though not as much as the first two episodes of last season. It's still-very talented writers and actors trying to make the best of an impossible situation that any other team would have walked away from by now. Paget Brewster was great and fits in perfectly. For me the big question is whether or not…

I've seen plays that we more exciting than this. Honest to God, plays!

Having no idea what the episode was going to be about, I (for some reason) ordered Papa John's for the first time in about five years an hour before it aired. That alone made my night. The coincidence, not the Papa John's.

I feel like that's the easy line to draw, but not the correct one. I remember when the show first came back from the dead, critics and fans alike were generally impressed with how it held up. Looking over the Season 4 episode list, I see a lot of gems.

As a disclaimer, I'm fairly new to Modern Family, have seen less than half the
episodes, and may not know what I'm talking about. That said, I've very much enjoyed what I've seen of the first few seasons, and I'm honestly surprised this episode got an
A-…and I'm used to being the one arguing against low grades.

I need help reacting to something:

I have to disagree about the audience participants. They were indeed usually terrible, but some of my fondest moments from the Drew Carey era were the performers (especially Ryan and Colin) bringing out the humor in just how little the audience participants were giving them to work with. I was bothered by the lack of…

You just blew my mind.

I'm with you. It's definitely in my Top 5. Yes, it was very caustic and no, it didn't have the heart later episodes did, but it perfectly set in place Dunder Mifflin's starting point. It made all that later change and growth so heartfelt and meaningful.

I'll do a Top 10:

I simultaneously really want to see this and hope to God they don't go this route.

I don't know, watching Annie make her Disney eyes over that Hannibal Lecter mask kind of made my night.

Some rambling thoughts about this episode and The Office at this point: