"To Ease The Pressure Of My Ever Worrying Mind" (First Impressions - "We Need To Talk About Lily" - Season 10, Episode 14)

First of all, as I posted in the comments about this press release,  I can't believe there actually will be an episode on January 30th.  This is the first time ABC has ever aired a new episode of Modern Family this late in the month of January - they usually air re-runs the last week or two before heading into February sweeps.

One thing this means is after this episode there will only be 8 new episodes left in Season 10, and about 16-17 weeks left to run them.  If ABC airs all new episodes during February then that leaves only 4 for all of March, April and whatever part of May (also a sweeps month) will be left.  That means a lot of re-runs as winter turns to spring, unless there is a pre-emption or two in February (they could also air a re-run or two, but that seems unlikely - unlike last year there's no Olympics with which to contend).

Anyway, getting back to the press release, while Alex is again not mentioned (and she doesn't appear in the promo photos release either), Bill is appearing as a guest star for the first time since DeDe's death episode.   So, hopefully there might be a story about the two of them (there's only two stories listed in the release).  But there's no guarantee, of course - they brought Alex's first CalTech roommate Maisie back for one episode ("The Storm") during her freshman year, but their story that night was minimal.

And there's no guarantee the news from whatever story does happen is good either - this could easily end up being their breakup story.

Yes, I know I'm probably being far too pessimistic about what looks like the first real chance for an Alex story in 2019, but given with each day I think it's more and more likely we end up with the first ever back-to-back-to-back Alex-less episodes before then, hopefully you can see why I fear the worst.

One other small piece of news: the title of next week's episode has been weirdly changed from "What's Next?" to "Whanex?" - I'm going to guess someone (Joe?) says it that way and it somehow becomes a thing.