Things aren’t looking great for Eric Stonestreet and his work husband.
The Modern Family alum recently explained that series co-creator Chris Lloyd‘s planned spin-off about Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Stonestreet) appears to be dead in the water, four years after the ABC sitcom ended its 11-season run.
“I don’t think it’s potential anymore,” he told Graham Bensinger in an interview. “They had their chance. Chris Lloyd and a couple of the writers wrote a really great script that spun Jesse and I off in our life in Missouri, and they said, ‘No.’ They just said, ‘We don’t want to do it.’
“I love my character. I love the show. I love Jesse. We had a great working relationship, we had amazing chemistry. I think Jesse and I maybe felt like they thought of us as the old guys, or something like that, that didn’t seem worthy of keeping those characters going. It felt a little hurtful. But people make business decisions,” added Stonestreet.
According to Stonestreet, the spin-off would have followed Mitch, Cam and their adopted teen daughter Lily Tucker-Pritchett (Aubrey Anderson-Emmons) as they move from California to Cam’s native Missouri.
Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Eric Stonestreet and Aubrey Anderson-Emmons in Modern Family. (Peter ‘Hopper’ Stone/ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“I think it would have been a slam dunk,” he said. “I don’t think it would have not been successful. Because you had one of the creators — who had really taken such great care of making sure that show was great for so long — willing to do it.”
Stonestreet noted that the parent series’ co-creator Steven Levitan was “understandably” worried the new show would have been just another spin-off for the sake of doing one, but Stonestreet feels otherwise: “We had the right people in place. It would have been great. If ABC would have said ‘Let’s do it,’ I think we’d be on right now.”
Although he doesn’t “know how it works anymore, because it’s been so long,” Stonestreet still hopes to reunite with his onscreen family again. “I wish we’d do a Christmas special,” he said.
Stonestreet won two Emmy Awards for his performance as Cameron Tucker-Pritchett on Modern Family, which debuted in 2009, also starring Ed O’Neill, Sofía Vergara, Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell, Sarah Hyland, Ariel Winter, Nolan Gould and Rico Rodriguez.