Not for several years has there been a reason even to spend a minute discussing new fiction programs on network television. CBS has turned over most of its time to forensic crime shows cast as sequels or spinoffs to its existing forensic crime shows. NBC was so incapable of following up its critical successes with The Office and 30 Rock that it finally chose to cede five of its 21 prime-time hours—24 percent!—to Jay Leno’s talk show, a decision it had to rescind in 17 weeks. Fox simply stretches American Idol into as many hours a week as it can. Back in the middle of the last decade, ABC suddenly came alive with three dynamic hours, the hospital-set Grey’s Anatomy, the campy suburban soap Desperate Housewives, and the science-fiction/fantasy/mystery/shaggy-dog story Lost. And then ABC went into hibernation, too. Everything of interest being done on television—everything—was being done on cable channels.
Until this past September, that is, when ABC debuted Modern Family. I didn’t watch it, and something unusual began happening; people started asking me if I’d seen it, and then someone else would overhear and say that, yes, he’d seen it too, and it was funny—really really funny—and the first person would agree, and then a third would join in. I was in two or three such round-robins, conversations that indicated Modern Family had succeeded in doing something no network sitcom in the past decade, besides 30 Rock, had succeeded in doing: getting people to talk about it. There are other successful situation comedies on the air, notably Two and a Half Men (with Charlie Sheen as a drug-crazed wife beater Malibu womanizer) and The Big Bang Theory (about geeky scientists and the hot girl across the hall), but they have no cultural purchase. Modern Family does, and it deserves to. The question is why, and the answer is an interesting one.
Modern Family is a story about a widowed 63-year-old father of a 40-year-old mother of three and a 35-year-old father of one. There have been a dozen sitcoms with a set-up of this sort in the past. But here, the 35-year-old man is gay, the child is an adoptive daughter from Vietnam, and he is in a long-term relationship. Meanwhile, the 63-year-old widower is married to a 35-year-old Colombian spitfire with an 11-year-old son of her own. Only the daughter is in a conventional marriage, and is a conventional character; but she is unlike other sitcom moms in that her kids loathe each other and her husband is a well-meaning, decent, and utter boob.
In every half-hour episode, there are three plot lines, one for each sub-family, and they are remarkably consistent. The hot-tempered but tightly controlled gay son gets himself all steamed up about something and then has to be saved from his own righteous indignation by his softer and more easygoing better half. The daughter has to adjudicate a struggle between her children that is usually made far worse by her husband’s bumbling. And the bluff and gruff father has to cope with the consequences of having a much younger and far wiser Hispanic wife—imagine Charo with the good sense of Donna Reed—no one believes is his and a soulful young stepson who grieves when he isn’t cast as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
Modern Family appears to be a celebration of every conceivable fashionable idea possible, as its title suggests and as the plotlines demonstrate. And it is no doubt intended to be so. But the reason the show is so funny and original is that it is also amazingly retrogressive. Despite its flashy postmodern filming techniques (it’s shot in the pseudo-documentary form used by The Office), Modern Family is an almost academic compendium of classic humor from a less enlightened and evolved age.
It’s an endless parade of fat jokes, sissy jokes, ethnic jokes, slut jokes, sex jokes, and to top it all off, old-time slapstick moron routines from the clueless husband (played by an actor named Ty Burrell who, if he keeps this up over a couple of seasons, will produce more laughs per minute than anyone on a sitcom since Tony Randall of The Odd Couple nearly 40 years ago).
It’s difficult to describe any one bit because the episodes (overseen by creators Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan) are so carefully constructed that the gags build on each other and all really pay off at the end. Like Seinfeld, the sitcom it resembles only because it’s the funniest one on a network since Seinfeld finished its run, every episode takes its disparate plot lines and harmonizes them at the climax in a way that recalls the watchwork plotting of expert French farce. But it all works only because Modern Family is making satirical hay out of the very cultural trends it is reflecting and saluting.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
