Modern Family Foreshadowed Haley’s Pregnancy Twist In The Pilot (2024)

In Modern Family’s pilot episode, Ariel Winter’s Alex correctly predicted the fate of Sarah Hyland’s Haley eleven seasons before it happened. When sitcoms run longer than anticipated, their pre-ordained endings can become problematic. Infamously, How I Met Your Mother earned the ire of critics and viewers alike with a divisive finale that revisited a romance from the show’s pilot, even though many fans had grown to dislike the character pairing during the intervening decade. Fortunately for Modern Family, the family sitcom did not have an ending in mind when the show began.

Despite this, Modern Family’s pilot featured a line where one of the show’s heroes accidentally predicted another character’s eventual fate to a tee. While Haley’s final Modern Family romance, a reunion with her first boyfriend Dylan, was a letdown for many viewers, this plot line nonetheless resulted in the character becoming pregnant with twins. Sarah Hyland, who played Haley, later voiced her displeasure with this twist, stating that she felt Haley’s professional ambitions took a backseat to motherhood in Modern Family season 11. However, the actor and Modern Family viewers could have seen this coming if they had studied the pilot closely.

Alex Predicted Haley & Dylan’s Future Children

In Modern Family’s pilot episode, Alex asks whether Haley will get pregnant now that she is dating Dylan. Her parents quickly shut down this line of questioning, resulting in Alex continuing to needle them for laughs. A decade later, in Modern Family season 10, episode 10, “Stuck in a Moment,” Hyland’s hated character ending came about when Haley announced to her parents that she was pregnant with Dylan’s twins. Bizarrely, this was precisely the fate Alex predicted for her, but Haley’s transformation in the intervening years makes it clear that this probably wasn’t planned.

Why This Modern Family Prediction Is So Strange

For years, Dylan was effectively forgotten by Modern Family as Adam Devine’s fan-favorite character Andy became the figure that most viewers wanted Haley to end up with. Haley’s romance with Andy saw her character grow and develop as a person, becoming a more mature version of herself and allowing Hyland to add layers to a character who had previously run the risk of seeming one-dimensional. However, when Modern Family’s Andy and Haley broke up, this paved the way for the return of Dylan and Haley’s eventual, unlikely journey to domestic bliss.

While it may have seemed like Haley and Andy were destined to end up together for some time, this was not how things panned out in Modern Family. Instead, Dylan returned, and Modern Family ended a season after Haley fell pregnant with her first boyfriend’s children. This twist turned Alex’s line in the pilot episode into a weird moment of foreshadowing when Dylan made a comeback. It seems very unlikely that the creators of Modern Family always knew they wanted Haley and Dylan to get back together, but this line means it is entirely possible.