Idiot Box: The sitcom that wasn’t shit

This week, the Internet has been abuzz with Emmy reactions. “Game of Thrones!” “Why didn’t Mad Men get any acting awards?” “Why do people still think Glee is funny?” But among all this hubbub, when you actually look at the winners, something fascinating comes to light—the night’s most successful show wasn’t a high-budget cable period piece, or a tried-and-true office comedy, or a bloody, serial killer drama (I know Dexter season five sucked, but seriously, Michael C. Hall deserves at least a pat on the back). It was…a network family sitcom?
That it was. ABC’s Modern Family took home five Emmys on Sunday night, including its second consecutive “Best Comedy” and awards for directing, writing, and acting. And yet, it’s on the same network and in the same genre as such specimens of television horror as Married to the Kellys. The fact that enough viewers trusted ABC during Modern Family’s debut season in 2009 to give the show a chance reveals that American TV audiences are an overly-optimistic bunch.
But when viewers did tune in to Modern Family, they got something unexpected. Family sitcoms have a formula—the good-looking parents, the goofy and/or inoffensively rebellious kids, the silly antics and G-rated troublemaking that always ends in a group hug and a one-liner from the requisite funny grandparent, all punctuated by a ubiquitous laugh track. Maybe I need to get off my TV high horse, but that doesn’t sound Emmy-worthy to me.
What does sound Emmy-worthy, though, is what Modern Family has that the other shows lack. That starts with its creators, writer/director powerhouse Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, who were behind shows from the golden age of the sitcom like Frasier. With that team behind the show, the situations episodes centered around weren’t going to be the same, formulaic drivel that other shows survive on.
The first tweak was to bring in a gay couple. This is a modern family, after all. The premise of the show’s mockumentary style—which, unlike that of The Office, is actually explained in the first episode—is that Mitchell and Cam, a gay couple from California consisting of a trim, put-together lawyer and a large, Midwestern, histrionic over-reacter, have just adopted their first child from Vietnam. And while this is hardly the first sitcom to feature a gay couple, each character’s combination of the stereotypical and non-stereotypical (Cam, the more flamboyant one, is revealed in one episode to be a former starter for the University of Illinois football team) render them complicated, hilarious, and decidedly non-formulaic.
The other two nuclear families on the show toe that same line between standard and unexpected. Claire and Phil, the characters for which Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell won their Emmys, are respectively neurotic and un-self-aware, avoiding the perfect, nurturing environment that the funny parents on other shows manage to create. Phil and Claire’s hijinks aren’t so vanilla as those of other sitcom parents, and when they joke about how badly they’ve screwed up their three somewhat dysfunctional kids, the audience laughs along uneasily.  And when their middle daughter retorts to her older sister that she “has an eating disorder [she] should be attending to,” the show enters a realm of dark humor rarely treaded by sitcoms. A laugh track would be inappropriate.
And of course, we can’t forget the last, and most unlikely, of the families on the show—Cam and Claire’s father, the wealthy, elderly Jay, and his impossibly hot, young, Columbian wife, Gloria, played impeccably by Sofia Vegarra. Together with Gloria’s son Manny, who acts beyond his years (although often unwisely) the trio provides the show’s funniest moments—like Gloria’s frequent English language mix-ups and Manny’s romantic failures—but also its most serious. An unwittingly emotional scene in the second season involving the stoic, detached Jay telling a demoralized Manny about manhood, a moment that provides genuine poignancy but never verges on cheesiness.
But if poignancy isn’t for you, there’s also a time when the shapely Gloria complains about her inability to ride a bike because “I kept hitting my boobs with my knees.” After all, it is on ABC.