Modern Family – Pilot

I’d like to welcome back Sharla to The Disney Blog. She’s doing a great job with Modern Family, but I’m still looking for more people to review ABC shows like Defying Gravity, Flash Forward, and V.

I was given the opportunity to watch a sneak preview of the pilot to Modern Family. As I previously wrote, this show looked promising, but I had my doubts. I am happy to say that my doubts no longer exist! The show was quite funny and had me laughing throughout.

Modern Family is a show filmed in mockumentary style, featuring a family with a gay couple, a Latina second (and much younger) wife, and a couple raising three kids. The gay couple has just returned from Vietnam where they adopted a baby. The family patriarch (played by Ed O’Neill) gets mistaken for his young wife’s father and a mall-walker because he is wearing a jogging suit). The more traditional couple consists of an overworked mom and a dad who just wants to be his kids’ best friend, so much so that he leaves all the disciplining to his wife while he texts and tries to use popular slang (and very badly).

It’s hard to do a recap of a show without a central plot, so time will tell if one plot line will surface or if the three separate families will continue to have their own plots while getting together with each other occasionally. Either way, Modern Family had my attention from the beginning and had me laughing the entire show.

The previews I had seen didn’t even lessen the comedic value of the bits because the actual scenes were much funnier than the simple previews lead to believe. The funniest scene (I won’t spoil it here, but it involved a bb gun) wasn’t shown in any of the previews I had seen, which made me laugh even harder.

Modern Family premieres Wednesday, September 23 at 9 pm on ABC amidst what looks like a hilarious lineup of brand new comedy. The bad news- it’s up against the popular and long-running Law and Order:SVU (which had to be moved to make way for Leno’s new show) and Glee, which has been absolutely fantastic so far. The good news is that abc.com has a great streaming site to watch its shows on, so let’s hope that many will choose to watch Modern Family in some fashion.