Modern Family

If you have not seen this, you are missing out! I think the series has won the Funniest TV Show Emmy four or five times in a row including this year for the latest season.

The episodes are self-contained, 30 min or so and usually tell parallel plots of three related families which eventually converge into a big finale. Al Bundy is basically the patriarch, married to a beautful Latina with an overweight son. Bundy's son is skinny and gay and lives with a hilariously camp (and overweight) partner. His daughter seems to be the only normal one with three young kids, but they are all also mad and funny.

The humor is American, but it works, because they manage to cover all the cliches of modern life from gadgets to boyfriends to racial prejudice to the hot neighbour and so on.

I think the show is in its sixth season (fifth year maybe) now and still going.. I love every episode of it. I guess it is the new friends.. in the 00s I was all young and single, now settled, pregnant and loving this show.

One of my favourite TV comedies of recent years was Arrested Development, an observational comedy of an extremely rich, morally corrupt family of Californian real estate developers which sadly was cancelled in its prime.

Although it won a brace of awards in the US and was loved by critics and certain demographics it just never caught on with the wider public. Some people think it's because it was too clever for its own good. I think that actually it was only because the main were so unsympathetic and rich people couldn't identify with them.

Modern Family, a new comedy on Sky One, is like Arrested Development, in the sense it's a smart observational satire about a dysfunctional US family, but the family in question are more average and suburban so it has done quite well because they are easier to identify with.

The comedy focus on the extended Pritchett family - father, son and daughter and their respective families and quirks. There's the gay son, his partner and their adopted Vietnamese daughter; the housewife daughter, her trying-too-hard-to-be-cool husband and their clutch of kids and the father with his extremely young and beautiful Colombian second wife how is younger than his kids.

As with all these clever comedies it's quite hard to explain the premise. The laughs are in the scripting, the observation of character flaws and the interaction of the characters which are all exceptionally well done. You should check it out.