New faux-documentary sitcom Modern Family has apparently scooped up all of the talented actors from this decade’s failed TV shows and given them better material. There’s Julie Bowen, who went from Ed to Jake in Progress, as micro-organizer mother of three Claire; Ty Burrell, recovering from Back to You, as her husband, a self-professed “cool dad”; Jesse Tyler Ferguson from The Class as her gay brother who recently adopted a Vietnamese baby with his partner (Eric Stonestreet, pictured left, with Ferguson); Sofia Vergara, the women who slaughtered the English language with her indecipherable accent on Hot Properties, is still slaughtering the English language but with better results as Claire’s step-mother; and Ed O’Neill has recovered nicely from Dragnet and John From Cincinnati with his role as the family’s patriarch, a gruff man with a trophy wife and no idea of how to be a father. Even Lipstick Jungle’s Sarah Hyland made the cut, as Claire’s whiny teenage daughter Hayley.
Of course, Modern Family’s success depends greatly on whether or not you’re exhausted by the format and how much familial dysfunction you’re willing to swallow. Watching Claire invade Hayley’s privacy because she doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she did is amusing, but ultimately exhausting. Teenage girls aren’t very interesting in real life, and watching them rebel on television is only marginally less painful. On the plus side, Modern Family does include two vastly under-exposed varieties of gay men: the bigger man and the redhead. Of course, they’re both flamboyant in different ways, but at least they don’t have the chiseled good looks and perfect body of, say, Melrose Place’s resident gay, PR guru Caleb.
Mostly though, Modern Family is about a great cast making hay out of a solid script. Bowen and Ferguson are both standouts as all too believable siblings, while O’Neill could play his role in his sleep. I’m not saying I’ll stop watching any time soon, but the scripts had better consistently match the pilot’s level, or I’m ignoring this crazy family the way I ignore my own.
Photo by Ron Tom/ABC.
