Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet Says It Was ‘Hurtful’ When ABC Passed on Cam-Mitchell Spinoff: ‘It Would Have Been a Slam Dunk’

Eric Stonestreet is opening up about a rejected Modern Family spinoff that didn’t make it past the script stage.

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The scrapped pilot, written in part by original series co-creator Christopher Lloyd, would have followed Cameron (played by Stonestreet), husband Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and teenage daughter Lily (Aubrey Anderson-Emmons) to a new state, after Cam accepted a coaching gig at the University of North Central Missouri in Modern Family’ s series finale.

“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,'” Stonestreet explained on In Depth With Graham Bensinger . “They just said, ‘We don’t want to do it.’

“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,” he shared. “It felt a little hurtful. But people make business decisions.”

To this day, the two-time Emmy winner maintains that the Cam-Mitchell offshoot would have been a “slam dunk,” adding: “I don’t think it would have not been successful. Because you had one of the creators — who had really taken such great care of making sure that show was great for so long — willing to do it.”

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Despite a spinoff being off the table now, Stonestreet remains hopeful for other creative ways to revive Modern Family in the future. “I wish we’d do a Christmas special, and there’s been talk of that,” he says.

Modern Family ran for 11 seasons on ABC, wrapping its run in April 2020. Stonestreet, Ferguson, Ty Burrell and Julie Bowen recently reprised their roles as Cam, Mitchell, Phil and Claire in a series of commercials for WhatsApp that began airing earlier this year. (TVLine has reached out to ABC for comment.)

You can watch the full interview with Eric Stonestreet above.

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