Steven Levitan's Advice on Writing: How Modern Family Rewrote Sitcom Rules

Steven Levitan co-created Modern Family, which won five consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series. He also created Just Shoot Me! and has written hundreds of TV episodes across his career. Before television, he was a local TV news reporter.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, No Film School, a Variety interview, and the On Wisconsin profile.

Write Fast, Fix Later

Levitan's first job was TV news. Go to a location. Figure out the story. Shoot footage. Sometimes go live two minutes later. Sometimes rush back and edit a script in time for the six o'clock news.

When he got his first TV writing job and they said they needed a script fast, he asked when. "In a week." An eternity.

He self-identifies as a fast-twitch writer. The anxiety of an unfinished script is worse than the pain of writing it. He jumps in, cannot stop thinking about it until it is done, and feels enormous relief when it is finished. "My attitude is you can go back and fix and you can go back and look at it."

He has worked with slow-twitch writers and finds it "both really good and at times really frustrating." The slow writer catches things the fast writer misses. The fast writer maintains momentum the slow writer loses. The best rooms have both.

Characters That Write Themselves

Before Modern Family started production, the writers spent eight to ten weeks doing nothing but talking about characters. Not plots. Not jokes. Characters. The relationships between them. What each person wants. What lens they see the world through.

Phil Dunphy thinks he is the cool dad. "I'm the cool dad. That's my thing." That single line defined everything. He is a boomer who believes he is as hip as anyone. He is not. He is a nerdy, embarrassing dad. But his delusion is genuine and good-hearted. "Phil is like a puppy in a meadow."

Claire is the responsible one. Phil is the fourth child. His job, as he sees it, is to make life more fun for Claire, who is a little rigid. Her job, as she sees it, is to keep the family from falling apart despite this man-child she married.

Levitan says the character work pays off in a specific way: when the character is fully built, you know what is funny before you write the scene. You know how Phil would react to anything. The comedy is not invented. It is discovered in the gap between who the character thinks they are and who they actually are. As Robert Mac puts it, surprise is the engine of humor - and the richest surprise comes from character, not from jokes.

The undone homework is visible. Levitan once created a bartender character for a series and said she would just be "a sarcastic bartender type." No deeper work. "I can't tell you how hard it was to write that character. I didn't do the homework." He can spot it in other shows too. "Oh, they didn't figure that character out." That is the character keeping the room two hours late every night.

Earn the Emotional Moment

Levitan's favorite sitcom scene of all time is from Taxi. Louie De Palma, played by Danny DeVito - hateful, lecherous, always hitting on everyone - has to shop for a suit. Elaine goes with him. He reveals, painfully, that he has to shop in the boys' department. "Oh my god, Louie." She gives him a hug. A genuinely moving moment. Vulnerability from the last character you expected it from.

Then he slowly reaches around and grabs her ass. The biggest laugh in the episode. Because you took the ride. You went from laughing to feeling to laughing again.

The lesson: emotional moments must be earned, and they must be understated. On Modern Family, Jay finds out that Manny's deadbeat father is not coming to pick him up. Again. Manny is sitting on the curb with his little backpack. Jay makes up a story about why the dad could not come - he was doing something heroic. Then the limo pulls up to take Jay and Gloria to Napa. Instead, they take Manny to Disneyland.

"He sucked it up without saying anything." No speech. No "I love you, kid." Just action within character. Levitan still gets choked up describing it.

Theme as North Star

Know the theme of what you are writing. It gives you a north star for every decision.

Some of Modern Family's best episodes organized three separate storylines around a single theme. An episode called "Fifteen Percent" explored whether people can change. The answer: maybe fifteen percent, but that can be enough. "Caught in the Act" played the phrase in multiple directions across all three families.

When the theme is clear from the beginning, every scene serves it. When it is not, scenes drift. You end up with funny moments that do not add up to anything.

The Antenna

Levitan says a comedy writer's antenna needs to be up at all times. Larry David is the master of this. He sees things nobody else would notice - the guy double-dipping into the dip - and says, "That's going in the book."

The Modern Family writers would tell each other on Fridays: be observant this weekend. Find something we can use. Then Monday, the room would pool observations from real life. A real argument overheard at a restaurant. A moment in a parking lot. The mundane parts of family life, trusted to be interesting because they are real.

Levitan once sat in a Portland bar and asked the bartender for a piece of paper. He filled it with every thought he had had that day. Roses he noticed. People he observed. Fentanyl ads on the street. "Under the register of consciousness, there's so many thoughts that are just kind of there waiting to be mined, but in the speed of everyday life, you just skip over those things."

Story Over Jokes

"The focus is always on telling a story, not on telling a joke." Jokes come out of the story. You do not concoct a story to keep telling jokes. If you start from funny lines and work backward, the result feels hollow. If you start from real situations and let the comedy emerge from character and conflict, it feels alive.

This is what separates Modern Family from shows that got laughs but did not last. The comedy lives inside the relationships. The jokes serve the story, not the other way around.

Conflict Is the Tinder

"It's hard to have a good story without some conflict." Conflict is where comedy comes from. Somebody has a goal. Something gets in the way. The gap between expectation and reality produces both humor and drama.

But lazy conflict does not work. "These two don't like each other" is not a dynamic. You have to go back to the characters. What specifically about their worldviews, their backgrounds, their self-images makes them rub each other the wrong way? The clash must come from something real, something rooted in who the characters are. As David Zucker shows with spoof comedy, the discipline of knowing what not to do matters as much as creative freedom.

Does It Feel Real?

If Levitan could give his writers' room one mantra, it would be: "Does it feel real?"

Are they talking the way people talk? Are you tapping into what you actually think about? He rewatched a classic 1970s sitcom pilot recently. As a young writer, he considered it perfect. Now it looked dated. The attitudes. The staging. What does not date is universal truth. Fathers and sons. Couples negotiating control and freedom. Those dynamics last forever.

He tells writers to tap into the zeitgeist, but also to ask what is timeless. "So far, Modern Family is aging well. That stuff is still going on between parents and kids till the end of time."

Key Takeaways

• Write fast, fix later. Momentum matters more than perfection in a first draft.
• Spend weeks building characters before writing a single scene. Know their lens on the world.
• Give characters a comic delusion. The gap between self-image and reality is where the funny lives.
• Earn emotional moments. Understated beats hit harder than speeches.
• Know your theme. It gives every scene a purpose.
• Keep your antenna up. Observe the mundane. Write it down.
• Story first, jokes second. Comedy that serves character lasts.
• Conflict is essential, but it must be rooted in character, not imposed from outside.

Levitan built a show that ran eleven seasons and made people around the world feel like they were watching their own family. The secret was not joke density. It was character depth. Athens helps you write with that same principle: get the substance right, then polish the surface.

This post draws from Levitan's appearance on How I Write, No Film School, and Variety.