Mockumentaries are the new up and coming genre in media. For those who are not familiar with this fairly new genre, a mockumentary is a category of television and film that acts as if a documentary but is in fact fictional. 
We are starting to see this genre more and more including popular television series such as The Office, My Life as Liz, Reno 911, and Summer Heights High.
We might wonder why this genre is all of a sudden becoming so much popular than it was before or can even ask ourselves why we enjoy these types of shows. By digging deeper into these media we can help to understand these types of questions.
Modern Family, as one of my favorite shows seemed to be a perfect example of a mockumentary I wanted to better understand and critique. For those of you who are not familiar with Modern Family, this is a show all about a comedic, relatable family.
The father Jay has two children, Claire and Mitchel who are both now parents of their own. Claire is a housewife, married to Phil with three children Haley, Alex and Luke. Mitchel, representing the gay population, and his partner Cameron adopted a Vietnamese baby named Lily. Jay himself remarried a gorgeous Columbian woman named Gloria and helped to be a father figure for her son Manny.
It seems as if Modern Family targets people of a Caucasian background but is not limited to that race only. I make this assumption for the fact that the initial family members in the show are Caucasian, yet Gloria and Manny and Columbian and Lily is Vietnamese. Correspondingly, this show seems to reach a wide spread age demographic of 18-49 according to this article.
To critique this show I decided to use the genre criticism approach. For those not familiar, this approach has a unique collection of elements and develops framework that serves to attract the audience’s attention.
Overall, genre criticism is considered to be at the intersection of the three different parts of the cultural diamond; text analysis, production analysis and audience analysis. For those who are not familiar with the cultural diamond, the textual analysis is concerned with the power of text to make meaning. The production analysis is how specific genre formulas serve to attract large audiences. Last, the audience analysis is how we use, interpret and make meaning from texts.
Genre criticism consists of three different approaches; aesthetic, ritual, and ideological. I will be looking at all three of these approaches to fully understand and learn about Modern Family. 
The first tactic, aesthetic is an approach that is very “superficial.” It identifies the stylistic features, looking at narrative structure and audio-visual codes. Overall, this approach stops short of providing insight.
As I already talked about before, because Modern Family is a mockumentary, the camera shots and angles act as if a documentary. For example, even on one scene from the latest episode, Mitchel and Cameron get into a car accident and the camera angle is from the inside of the car. The camera does not always seem sturdy and sometimes acts as if a professional is not the one doing the taping. Also, there is absolutely no music in this show which is a very popular characteristic of mockumentaries. As you can tell, the aesthetic approach shows very apparent features about the media.
The second tactic is the ritual approach generally provides the audience with insight of why we are attracted the genre. This could be reoccurring themes for example. The approach helps us to understand how texts of a genre interact with cultural forces such as the production or audience.
Modern Family unquestionably has reoccurring themes throughout every episode. For the fact of the major difference in all of the character’s personalities, each person always has somewhat of the same issues going on with them throughout each episode. Lets take Claire and Phil for example. Claire is a type a, thriving for success and a challenge type of person. Every episode she needs to win or beat someone or succeed at something new. Phil is the opposite of Claire. He is very silly and in every episode always seems to mess something up in one way or another. This idea goes hand in hand for each of the family’s drama as well.
Using semiotics, the study of how social production of meaning is constructed through signs, you are able to notice all of the signs embedded in the texts. You can tell by this show that reality is socially constructed. For example, this show uses many stereotypes, one being of homosexuals. Mitchel and Cameron have the stereotypical gay relationship. One is manlier than the other and both look like the stereotypical gay man. Nonetheless, they adopted a little girl from Vietnamese. This reality of gay men is being reinforced by how it is being socially constructed through this show.
Last but certainly not least, the ideological approach is what provides the full insight into the rhetorical force of the text. This approach views television texts as instruments of power and control. It examines the genre fully to understand how it naturalizes dominant ideology.
To examine this approach, I am going to focus primarily on Jay and Gloria. Jay is the most dominant throughout the whole show, the breadwinner. He lives in a very big house and always has nice things. He had one divorce and is now married to a young, hot Columbian woman who is unmistakably a lot younger than him. She does not need to hold down and job and her clever son lives with the both of them. This reinforces the rich older man with the young, trophy wife.
All of these ideas planted into the show are reinforcing our ideas of gender relations, race and class. The ideological approach lets us realize how much media plants into our heads.
By looking at the genre criticism approach we can now see how media shapes our lives not only individually but as a culture. We have looked at Modern Family through text, production and the audience for us to fully understand why this is so important. As I talked about in my last blog, media literacy is such an important characteristic to have to understand how enormous media impact essentially is.
