Modern Family isn’t done with holiday hijinks quite yet. After a disastrous Thanksgiving party and an over-budget winter dance, the Pritchett clan will ring in the new year with a blast from the past when Kelsey Grammer surfaces in the Jan. 4 episode as a former circus man who disappeared without a reason and broke Cam’s heart.
“We have alluded to [Cam’s pre-Mitchell love life] a little bit from time to time but have never really met exes. Given that this guy was a ringmaster and we know Cam is a clown, it is a great little tie-in,” Eric Stonestreet told Yahoo TV during a visit to the set (actually, the Brentwood mansion Jay and Gloria call home) last November. “We love when they give us an opportunity to find out more about our character’s past. It’s something to chew on from a performance perspective, and I think audiences love it as well.”
“Ringmaster Keifth,” which also sees the return of Fred Willard as Phil’s dad, revolves around Cam seeking culinary redemption after blowing up the Thanksgiving turkey. He has promised to roast a whole pig in his in-law’s lawn on New Year’s Day. But when that “comeback meal” also starts to go south, desperate times call for desperate measures. Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) lets Cam use his e-Butler gift certificate, a recent Christmas present from his dad, to enlist a concierge’s help in securing perfectly prepared pork for a secret swap-out. Things get instantly more complicated when Cam recognizes the voice on the other end of the line as the one belonging to a former flame who ghosted him back when he was a naïve Missouri farm boy new to Los Angeles.
“I’m the ex-lover-ringmaster-boyfriend who comes back into Cam’s life by chance for a brief bit of closure,” explained Grammer, who was burning up, thanks to the tuxedo costume and the unseasonably warm fall temps in Southern California at the time. “All these years later, he still has no idea why this guy left him, and it still hurts. He’s thought it was him the whole time.”
Stonestreet, looking silly in a “Cam and Get It” bovine-print apron complete with clattering cowbells, added: “There are some great, hilarious details in the script. Kelsey and I both think that one of the funnier lines is when Cam reveals that he saw Keifth at the circus and then started hanging out at circus bars trying to meet him. I would hit the circus bar in the valley, and then I would hit the circus bar on the west side. I love the thought of an L.A. bar for circus folk.”
The minute the writers/producers decided the past paramour had once commanded three rings in a top hat, Grammer’s name moved to the top of their wish list. Luckily, Cam isn’t the only guy who has history with Keifth. Grammer and Modern Family executive producer Christopher Lloyd became friends more than two decades ago when Lloyd was a writer for Frasier from 1993 to 2004. He also created Grammer’s 2007 news anchor sitcom, Back to You.
“I wouldn’t care what it was [because] Chris has one of the most extraordinary imaginations. It was Chris that actually wrote for the voice of Frasier on the show,” Grammer said. “You’d see him go off in a sort of a reverie trying to match in his mind what I might say. He does a sort of kind of Kabuki impression of me as Frasier. And then he’d start to spout a sentence. So I imagine he loaned a good deal of his inner voice to Frasier. But the bonus is that Keifth is also pretty funny, and I’ve never played a ringmaster before, so why not?”
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