After Modern Family ended, there was a Mitch and Cam spinoff at the works at ABC that ultimately got shot down.
In a new interview, Jesse Tyler Ferguson revealed that although he was interested in reprising his role as Mitchell Pritchett in the new series, he felt trepidation.
“Modern Family ended and then we had a pandemic, you know. I was so excited for this next chapter of my life, and then it was like, everyone go inside,” Ferguson said on the Dinner’s On Me podcast said while speaking with The Goldbergs alum Wendi McLendon-Covey.
Ferguson said that producers “brewing this idea of maybe doing a Modern Family spinoff with [Eric Stonestreet] and I, which I was interested in, but I was also supposed to do this play in New York.”
The spinoff would have seen Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet reprising their Modern Family roles as they made a life in Missouri. Ferguson and Stonestreet starred in the ABC comedy for 11 seasons, which ended its run in 2020.
“It sort of felt like, as the reality of, maybe the spinoff was actually going to happen, I literally felt like, Oh my god, I want to date other people,” he said.
After playing the same character for over a decade, Ferguson wanted to explore other areas of acting and “feel what it’s like not to do that,” but ultimately, “it ended up not working out.”
In 2024, Stonetreet opened up about his feelings after ABC opted not to move forward with the spinoff.
“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,’” he said in an interview with Graham Bensinger.
He added, “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.”
Stonetreet felt that the new series “would have been a slam dunk,” adding, “”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.”
