Modern Family

In the build-up to this year’s Emmy Awards, most people would have bet on Glee or 30 Rock to win best comedy series. The smart money, however, was always on Modern Family. In the end, the show won three Emmys to Glee’s two and 30 Rock’s big fat zero. Inspired by This Is Spinal Tap and The Office (the original British version, not the US remake), Modern Family is quite possibly the best family comedy on television. It bucks the recent trend of placing TV shows in the workplace – from Mad Men to 30 Rock and on to Nurse Jackie – by following the lives of three odd, affluent, interconnected families living in the suburbs.Modern Family Season 1-11 Download.

The premise of the series is simple: the families are being filmed for a documentary that will appear on Dutch television. This mockumentary style neatly allows the audience to see each character both in situ with their families and being interviewed alone on a sofa. Phil (Ty Burrell) is married to Claire (Julie Bowen); they have three kids together. At the start of season one, broadcast on Sky1 this time last year, Phil eagerly introduces himself to the interviewer as the cool dad. He’s clearly anything but. “I’m hip, I surf the web, I text. LOL: Laugh out loud. OMG: Oh my God. WTF: Why the face?” He also knows the moves from High School Musical.

Claire, meanwhile, has given in to her husband’s determination to relate to his kids by being “cool”, and seems to have all but given up on one daughter: “If Haley never wakes up on a beach in Florida half-naked, I’ve done my job.”According to Bowen, it’s a bit like watching The Office when it was first broadcast in 2001: “You’d sit there thinking, ‘Oh my God, am I the only person who heard that? Am I the only person who saw that?'”