It started with the EW Fall TV Preview. There was something about Ed O'Neill and his new show, and something about how the show can best be represented with an equation involving Arrested. In the positive sense. (As in, this show is not -Arrested Development)
Intrigue radar tuned but heartily skeptical, I continued to keep an eye out for headlines, summaries and critical missives mentioning the show. Surely, surely it couldn't be as good as Arrested Development. Surely it was going to crash and burn after an excessively clever and overambitious pilot.
Luckily for me and the rest of the viewing public, reports of Modern Family's brilliance have not been exaggerated.
The setup is something out of a Full House nightmare-- the patriarch, played by O'Neill, is newly married to a Colombian bombshell who happens to have a ten-year-old son. His daughter, played by none other than Mrs. Dr. Jack Shepherd, is the head of a "classic" family-- working dad, stay-at-home mom, two girls and a boy. The final Pritchett is the gay son who has just returned from adopting a Vietnamese baby with his partner.
They all manage to get in the same room in each episode so far, and when they do it's glorious. It's the spouses who shine in these early days (though everyone is at the top of their game)-- the bombshell and her ridiculous (but highly articulate) accent; the gay partner who wears pink paisley shirts but also happens to have been an offensive lineman for the University of Illinois; the husband who thinks he's cool, but so painfully isn't (one of my favorite lines: "I text... 'LOL,' laugh out loud... 'OMG,' oh my God... 'WTF,' why the face?").
The characters are ripe and dimensional, the stories relatively small but spectacularly written, the humor at once subtle and joltingly funny.
Arrested Development comparisons are a little premature but not far off-- so far, I think we've found a worthy successor. Let's see how things develop.
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