Modern Family: Season 3 Premiere

It’s very modern. It’s about a family. And that’s just about it.

Yet, this deceptively simple, gimmick-free format has just garnered another five, thoroughly deserved Emmys, ensuring that Sofia Vergara’s formidable décolletage is going to remain a red carpet fixture for the foreseeable future.

So what is it that has viewers flocking, critics swooning and award juries falling over themselves to lavish prizes on this modest and, in many respects, unremarkable sitcom? 

The answer, quite simply, is character.

The show’s creators have come up with a perfect microcosm of modern American life – each one sharply drawn, totally believable and inadvertently hilarious. Their vulnerabilities and insecurities painfully laid bare every week as each of them struggle to come to terms with their own position in the complex familial hierarchy.

But the real genius is how the juxtaposition of each personality is set up to create instant conflict. All the writers need to do is plonk them down in any situation and watch the sparks and the laughs fly.

There’s the grumpy, old, golf-playing, conservative, patriarch Jay (Ed O’Neill) and his fiery, street-wise, brassy young Columbian wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara), who is the mother of wise-head-on-young-shoulders Manny (Rico Rodriguez). Polar opposites that inexplicably seem to attract.

Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) and his wife Clare (Julie Bowen) both desperately trying to be perfect parents in an imperfect world. He wants to be the cool dad, she is the control freak mom. They tell their kids how to behave when they are often incapable of doing so themselves.

Even their two girls Alex (Ariel Winter) and Haley (Sarah Hyland) couldn’t be more different. One is the plain, level-headed nerd, the other the pretty, air headed mean girl. Only sweet little Luke (Nolan Gould) has no axe to grind; locked in his own little world, blissfully unaware of the barbs and back-biting swirling around him.

And then there’s Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet). One is a frustrating lawyer, the other a frustrated entertainer. The chalk and cheese, Laurel and Hardy, gay couple struggling to raise an adopted Asian baby.

However, the laughs don’t just come from watching how the cast act and interact; there is also a huge amount of humor in the everyday situations in which they find themselves. A great deal of what we find funny comes from identification. We laugh because we’ve been there ourselves.

Modern Family doesn’t shy away from reality. It tackles situations from taking advantage of political correctness and sexual orientation in order to get a child into kindergarten to dealing with your kids walking in on you during sex. If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, this is a show about the true minutiae of everyday life: birthdays, Halloween, first boyfriends, driving tests. It’s all there in its mundane glory.

That’s why when the Season Three premiere opened on a plane; I felt a little queasy. Was this the first whiff of shark in the air? Why have the show-runners gone off reservation? Could it be running out of steam after just two seasons?

The answer, fortunately, is no. There were still plenty of laughs, even if there weren’t quite as many as normal.

The action moved the family, City Slickers style, to a dude ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but the traditional format was still firmly in place: two or three parallel, intersecting story lines laced with the almost mandatory to-camera confessionals that somehow loosely reflect a central theme. This theme is revealed in a wrap-up voice over at the end explaining, in classic Oprah style, what we have ‘learned’ from our experiences.

But the premiere’s theme was a little vague. Something about ‘finding oneself’.

Jay found himself trying to deal with the cowboy Hank (Tim Blake Nelson) hitting on Gloria. Phil and Clare found themselves having to deal with Haley’s boyfriend Dylan’s (Reid Ewing) marriage proposal, while Mitchell found himself having to come to terms with the prospect of adopting a baby boy and not feeling macho enough.

In a bizarre and not terribly convincing side plot, Alex ended up kissing a boy from Jersey who looked disconcertingly like Eddie Munster. Let’s not go there.

All issues were swiftly resolved: Mitchell blew up a bird table, Dylan decided to stay at the ranch, and Phil helped Jay see off the amorous ranch hand.

Best line of the night went, as is often the case, to my favorite character Phil. Sitting uneasily astride his horse with Jay behind him, Phil delivered what he felt was a devastating coup de grace to the hapless cowboy by threatening to only check “somewhat satisfied on the comment card.”

Given the massively high comedic benchmark that Modern Family has set itself over the two seasons, I think that would also have to be my verdict on this season’s opener.