One big hilarious family

Modern Family is an Emmy winning American sitcom,presented in a mockumentary style,which chronicles three different sets of people from the same family. The half-hour series is not your typical laugh-out-loud fare nor does it contain irritating laughter track in the background as seen in F.R.I.E.N.D.S or How I Met Your Mother. Modern Family tries to entertain intellectually and is more in the vein of Tina Feys award-winning series 30 Rock.

Modern Family relies more on clever puns and mocks average situations that a modern American family would generally face. The sitcom details the families of Jay Pritchett (Ed ONeill),his daughter Claire Dunphy (Julie Bowen) and his son Mitchell Pritchett (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). It is set in Los Angeles wherein Claire plays a homemaker mother married to Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) with two young children and a teenage daughter. Jay is married to a much younger Colombian woman,Gloria (Sofía Vergara) and lives along with her son Manny from a previous marriage. Mitchell,on the other hand,is in a homosexual relationship with his partner Cameron Tucker (Eric Stonestreet) and the duo has recently adopted an eight-month old Vietnamese baby named Lily.

It is easy to see the confrontations and confusions the setting and the families create. Add to that character quirks of each member of the family and the laughs become truly Emmy-worthy. The star cast does a superb job of setting up the situations that bring on the inevitable laughs. So you have Phil stealing a bicycle from the street to teach his son a lesson before realising he has stolen another kids bike,Camerons reactions to Mitchells mothering nature,Gloria reminiscing about her former macho husband in comparison to the sober and older Jay and Claires grating attempts to maintain peace in her house along with the kids,all of whom have a mind of their own.

To explain a particular situation or a characters response to it,the actors describe their intention in the form of a confession to the audience. This keeps the viewer clued in to the happenings. Not only do we see the situation from outside,but we also understand the happenings. The sitcom also has its emotional moments,something that we will cherish and identify with.

At the Emmy Awards this year,the sitcom won top honours like Outstanding Comedy Series,Outstanding Supporting Actor in Comedy Series for Eric Stonestreet and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for the sitcoms creators Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd. The awards and the applause are much deserved,for rarely does a show entertain as much as Modern Family does. Give it a shot,you wont regret it.

Verdict: ****

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