Modern Family opens Halloween episode with death of MAJOR character

Modern Family opens Halloween episode with SHOCK DEATH of beloved character

  • CONTAINS SPOILERS 

Modern Family opened its Halloween episode on Wednesday with the death of one of its beloved characters.

Claire Dunphy [Julie Bowen] and Mitchell Pritchett [Jesse Tyler Ferguson] learned that their mother – DeDe Pritchett – had died, while the siblings were dressed up in Halloween costumes.

DeDe had been played sporadically by former Cheers star Shelley Long, 69, since season one in guest and recurring roles.

Halloween loss: Modern Family opened its Halloween episode on Wednesday with the death of one of its beloved characters

The season 10 fifth episode titled Good Grief opened with Claire and husband Phil [Ty Burrell] preparing their suburban Los Angeles home for trick-or-treaters.

Claire was decked out in a black and red spider costume while Phil as a fly got caught in decorative webbing.


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She went to retrieve scissors to free him and fielded a call from her mother’s husband Jerry.

‘What’s wrong? When? How?’ Claire quizzed him.

Recurring role: Shelley Long, shown in a season four still, played DeDe Pritchett in guest and recurring roles since season one of the ABC sitcom

She hung up and sadly declared, ‘My mom’s dead’.

Claire and her brother reminisced about their mother and their differing relationships with her.

‘I was just thinking about this great Halloween with mom,’ Mitchell said.

Tough call: Claire while dressed in her Halloween costume learned that her mother died

‘I wasn’t really fitting in in high school, so mom took me to go get ice cream at this place in West Hollywood and the parade was going on and before that, I had never been to a gay event.

‘The thing is, she didn’t force me to talk about it. She just let it be. I think that was her way of saying she was okay with me,’ Mitchell said.

Claire shared her ice cream story.

Ice cream: Mitchell told his sister about a sweet ice cream trip with his mother

Harsh story: Claire also recalled her own bitter ice cream story with their late mother

‘I remember once that mom told me that I ate ice cream like a prostitute,’ she said.

DeDe was a semi-regular over multiple seasons as mother, ex-wife of Jay Pritchett [Ed O’Neill] and grandmother of Luke [Nolan Gould], Hayley [Sarah Hyland], Alex [Ariel Winter] and Lily [Aubrey Anderson-Emmons].

Alex got lusty in her grief, while Luke relied on humor and Hayley turned to eating to cope with her sorrow.

Scary talk: Trick-or-treaters got spooked overhearing Claire talk about her late mother

Hayley’s food fest had the unintended consequence of turning her from an airhead to a savant.

‘Your brain is working because it’s not starving,’ her smart sister Alex surmised.

Phil and Cameron Tucker [Eric Stonestreet] swapped stories about eccentric DeDe while stuck in traffic and eating ice cream.

Brain food: Hayley coped by eating and suddenly became smarter as Luke and Alex with her new firefighter beau looked on

Gloria Delgado-Pritchett [Sofia Vergara] – who was despised by DeDe after Phil married the much younger Colombian bombshell – was convinced that DeDe was haunting her.

Jay throughout the episode lamented over a missing sandwich.

He finally explained at the end that when he was first married to DeDe and they lived in the San Fernando Valley that she would go to a specific bakery for crunchy sandwich bread.

Haunted house: Gloria was convinced that DeDe was haunting her

‘I happened to drive there a while ago. The bakery wasn’t there anymore. Damned if I wasn’t depressed for a week. I didn’t realize how much it meant to me until it was gone,’ Jay said.

Lily revealed during the faux documentary-style sitcom that she ate her grandfather’s sandwich and was planting DeDe dolls to spook Gloria.

The family learned toward the end of the half-hour episode in an email that DeDe while on a trip with a women’s group in Greenland wandered away on the third night.

The trickster: Lily admitted that she ate her grandfather’s sandwich and planted dolls to spook Gloria

She came across a pack of timberwolves and tried communicating via howls and whistles and successfully convinced them to seek food elsewhere.

The email said she later ignored a thin ice warning and plunged into freezing water, but was saved by a wolf and also survived being swallowed by a whale.

Claire then revealed that DeDe was found in her room after peacefully passing in her sleep while holding 10 pages of suggestions for the hotel staff.

‘That sounds so much like mom,’ Claire said. 

Like mom: Claire was not surprised to learn that her mother died holding 10 pages of suggestions for the hotel staf

Show co-creator Christopher Lloyd, 57, revealed last month that season 10 wouild deal with the death of one of the main characters of the long-running ABC series.

‘We’re handling some bigger life events in this season,’ he said.

‘We do deal with a death, which is certainly a topic that families have to deal with, and on television, it’s not easy to do because that’s a heavy subject. But at the same time, it would seem unusual for a family not to go through it.’

Lloyd remained secretive on which character fans would be saying goodbye to and wouldn’t confirm if the death would be of a main family member.

He did admit the death of a ‘significant character on the series’ would be ‘a moving event — and an event that has repercussions across several episodes.’

Family loss: Alex got lusty while coping with her grandmother’s death

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