Modern Family’s latest episode is a must-watch for anyone trying to tell stories online

If you spend any time thinking about how technology is changing the way we communicate with one another, from now on you will need to include last night’s episode of ABC’s TV series Modern Family in your thinking.

Radically departing from its traditional setting, the comedy presented an entire half-hour show through the Macbook Pro desktop of lead character Claire. While marketers, vendors, and media thinkers have frequently pondered and pitched multi-channel or even omnichannel experiences, last night’s show was the most perfectly realized multi-channel narrative I’ve ever seen. (It’s available on Hulu Plus and other sources.)

Employing every common communication vehicle available to a Mac user, Claire frantically searches for one of her three children, twenty-something Haley, following a verbal fight the two have had. She does so from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, awaiting her return flight from a business trip, and the entire show takes place in real-time. Here’s a clip from the opening:

In her typically manic style, Claire keeps pinging the other family members as Haley’s whereabouts slowly unfold, using FaceTime video with iPhones and iPads, chat, email, Web searches, Facebook pages, and more. (Apple’s products are featured prominently in one of the successful product placement coups ever, but the show’s producers have insisted they paid nothing to the tech giant.)

The show’s creators have readily acknowledged their debt to Noah, a 17-minute film that similarly told its tale entirely from a desktop. But Noah is a rough and unsatisfying antecedent, presenting a breakup between a teenaged couple that jumps forward in time at one point and leaves a variety of not-really-answered questions — not the least of which are the reasons behind the breakup.

This “Connection Lost” episode of Modern Family, on the other hand, is a rare example of modern communication tools perfectly meshed with the plot line, driven by a mother’s urgency and the show’s well-honed comic timing, and ending in a satisfying narrative resolution. After various detours, we find out what happened to Haley, and it turns out the communication tools have themselves contributed to the mystery.

Channels? Not quite

For those of us who hear almost daily about how modern marketers and storytellers need to accommodate this multi-channel world, the episode’s success highlights the failings of much of that discussion.

First of all, “channel” now seems to be the wrong word. Most commonly, it has been used to describe channels on a TV, each of which are identical in the video and audio they deliver.

By contrast, live chatting, Facebook pages, video phone calls, and the like are very different from each other, and describing them as “channels” seems to obscure those fundamental differences.

For the moment, let’s call them “modes.” Last night’s fast-moving episode made clear that each mode brings a particular configuration of space and time dimensions that makes them unique. And, as multi-channel thinking evolves, those uniquenesses would best be factored into any expressive or marketing uses.

When using a video call, for instance, Claire sees background and side information that qualifies the conversation, often comedically.

On the other hand, an instant message is one-dimensional, with pauses that can be exploited for narrative timing. When thinking Haley has made a bad move, Claire calls up a brief slide show of her daughter as a young child, pushing the time arrow into the past for a few moments. And a status change of Facebook, almost outside of regular time, ripples through all the working assumptions.

The other word that would best be retired from discussions of multiple communication modes should be “unified,” as in the common “unified multi-channel experience” one frequently hears from marketing tech vendors. Take a look at the episode and decide for yourself if there is anything “unified” going on between the different communication modes, even though it is all part of one story.

Instead, it is clear that the aim for marketers should be “consistency” across channels, as Claire finds out when her communication partners start comparing notes with each other.

Perhaps the biggest revelation, though, is how many of our daily stories take place in multiple levels, streams, and time frames — all at once.

Stories that still evolve in linear time — in movies or TV, or in scenarios depicting a customer’s straight-line journey — now seem like a quaint relic from a time when no modern family had such communication dashboards at their fingertips.