Recently, Modern Family promised us death as well, and while someone did die, a lot of viewers felt a little let down.
Unlike Arrow, which is filled with death and destruction and potentially fatal fights on a regular basis, Modern Family is not a show where you'd typically expect to find a lot of death. It's not one of those comedies that occasionally gets serious, like a black-ish or a Mom, and its extended dysfunctional family rarely faces real problems amidst their hijinks and shenanigans. In other words, death was sure to be a shock to the entire Modern Family system.
The problem was that the dead character was labeled "significant," and on Modern Family, the only characters most people think of as significant are the many, many series regulars. Of course, the family itself would think of Shelley Long's DeDe as "significant," since she's Claire and Mitchell's mother, but she was also only in seven out of 216 episodes, and most of the Pritchett clan did not seem to like her or her eccentricities all that much.
Even the show's executive producers thought they had messed up a bit with the word "significant."
"I was, frankly, a little bit afraid that we, in a weird way, over promised," creator Steve Levitan told EW. "That people were thinking it's one of our main main regulars, and we would hear some occasional weird theories on that. I guess I think we were all a little bit shocked at how much we've been asked in real life, ‘Who is it?' It really took us by surprise…Maybe [viewers will] be pleasantly surprised that it wasn't one of our regular people, but I hope we don't disappoint, as strange as that sounds, or that they were gearing up for more and say, ‘Oh, is that all?' But it's significant to us. She's a very significant character in so many of our characters' lives that it's still meaningful."
Even if, as we can admit, killing DeDe made the most sense, it's never a good sign for your character's impact when everyone assumes that a "significant" death will either be you or the family dog.