Families are the one thing all of us people on this little blue planet have in common – unless you’re one of the clones of non-threatening, clean-cut, perfect-smiling, asexual boys that the Disney Corporation genetically splices from the sperm of Peter Pan and the ovum of a unicorn every few years (notice that Zac Efron has birthdays, but never grows up, doesn’t seem to have genitalia and has a marked fear of pirates and crocodiles).
But the rest of us are all involved with our families in some way, whether it’s getting the in-laws together for a nice Sunday roast, tromping around the Swiss Alps together singing songs about despondent ungulates, or dressing up as your dead mother and stabbing that strumpet showering in the next room over. Even gay people take time out from our usual agenda of attempting to destroy the nuclear family and all its works to occasionally pose for a portrait with Great Aunt Bette before we go back to our insidious plot to pervert families, marriage and rainbows.
So let’s all give the baby a fork and a power outlet to play with and tell Grandma that there’s no ‘coloured gardener’ hired to trim her hedges so that figure she saw outside her window was clearly the Grim Reaper, as we sit down to a nice nuclear meltdown with the nuclear members of MODERN FAMILY (Ten, Tuesdays at 8pm)
Mockumentaries are never a good sign in this day and age. Put a team of relative unknowns in front of a camera they’re operating themselves and it’s only a matter of time before they get eaten by the Cloverfield Monster or hexed up real good by the Blair Witch. Add the word ‘American Sitcom’ after the word ‘Mockumentary’ and you have a combination that most discerning television viewers would view with roughly the same enthusiasm as the words ‘Freddy Krueger’ and ‘Enema’.
However, MODERN FAMILY is that rarest of beasts- an American sitcom that actually manages to be funny. This is largely due to the writers of the show being collectively responsible for THE GOLDEN GIRLS and FRASIER (and the execrable David Spade vehicle JUST SHOOT ME, but I’m trying to make a point here, so we’ll ignore that one).
MODERN FAMILY tells the tale of the Pritchett clan, comprised of a sixty-something patriarch and his much younger and hotter wife, his two adult children, respective partners and grandchildren. Okay, nothing so ground-breaking there, and certainly the format is familiar. What is different is both the quality of the writing and the composition of the family. This is a classic sitcom that turns the routine formula on its head, like series 1-10 of THE SIMPSONS, not some run of the mill cardboard cut-out with heavily telegraphed awkward comedy that fails to raise so much as a smile, like series 11-22 of THE SIMPSONS.
Ed O’Neill plays Pritchett Patriarch Jay- O’Neill is no stranger to subversive sitcoms about dysfunctional domiciles as he played uber-jerk Al Bundy in MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. He’s supported here by his wife Gloria (Colombian supermodel Sofia Vegara,) who not only has a pree-teen son but is also 37 years his junior. (‘It was either her or a Porsche- and no, not a red one’). Jay’s daughter, Claire (Julie Bown, LOST) is married to Phil (Ty Burrell- DAWN OF THE DEAD remake) and they have three kids who are predictably precocious and sarcastic in the way that a lot of sitcom kids are- however, in this sitcom, they are called on and often punished for their behaviour by the events of the script.
It’s Jay’s son Mitchell (Gay actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson) who really interests us though. Openly gay, Mitchell is in a long term-relationship with the portly Cameron (straight actor Eric Stonestreet). The pair have successfully adopted a Vietnamese baby, Lilly- and whilst the situation is mined for laughs, amazingly the show also looks at the nasty stereotypes and red tape that makes adopting kids a continued difficulty for gay couples. In addition, Cameron and Mitchell had hoped to get married before California’s discriminatory Proposition 8 led to a flashfire of constitutional amendments banning gay marriage across the USA- and this is not mined for laughs, but is instead shown as something of a disgraceful inequality by the program. (‘Out of 52 States we’re down to maybe 5, and it’ll be a cold day in Hell before I tie the knot in Connecticut’). Mitchell and Cameron are treated just the same as any other member of the family, and their love for each other is celebrated and seen as just as valid as that of Claire and Phil (and MORE valid than Jay and Gloria’s ‘Mid-Life Cris Hitch’).
Recent controversy emerged over the fact that whilst trumpeting equality, MODERN FAMILY showed the heterosexual characters kissing and sharing a bed, but confined Mitchell and Cameron to hugs. The show’s writers promised that such controversy was premature, and that an upcoming episode should put any talk of inequality to bed (‘along with some other things’) Hmmm….
Grab your favourite sibling in a headlock and force them to watch it with the whole family!
Gavin Pitts
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