Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Ellen Gray: 'Modern Family' tops the heap of new shows

MODERN FAMILY. 9 tonight, Channel 6. COUGAR TOWN. 9:30 tonight, Channel 6. IT'S NOT easy launching five new shows on a single night, and tonight ABC is taking it one step at a time as it uses its biggest hit, "Dancing with the Stars," to give three of those shows a fighting chance.

MODERN FAMILY. 9 tonight, Channel 6.

COUGAR TOWN. 9:30 tonight, Channel 6.

IT'S NOT easy launching five new shows on a single night, and tonight ABC is taking it one step at a time as it uses its biggest hit, "Dancing with the Stars," to give three of those shows a fighting chance.

At least one of them actually deserves it.

That would be "Modern Family," a mockumentary about, well, a modern family, produced by Steven Levitan ("Just Shoot Me") and Christopher Lloyd ("Frasier").

Ed O'Neill, who's largely been working in drama since Fox's "Married . . . With Children" ended, has picked the right project to return to the light side.

He plays Jay, who's newly married to a much younger woman, Gloria (Sofia Vergara), and is stepfather to an 11-year-old boy, Manny (Rico Rodriguez), he clearly loves but can't begin to understand.

Julie Bowen ("Ed") plays Claire, a tightly wound mother of three who may or may not be channeling Kate Gosselin. (If, God forbid, there's a TV movie, Bowen should expect a call.) Her husband, Phil (Ty Burrell), wants to be a cool dad, with predictably disastrous results.

And then there are Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), a gay couple who've just adopted a daughter.

If you've watched ABC's promos, you may already know how these people relate to each other, but it's not meant to be immediately clear. Not that it matters: The big surprise in "Modern Family" isn't that final reveal, it's that a format that too often enforces a smug distance between characters and the audience can be used in ways both hilarious and heartwarming.

Modern families are, in fact, the subject of all four of ABC's new Wednesday night sitcoms - next week, we'll get Patricia Heaton's "The Middle" and Kelsey Grammer's "Hank" - but not all modern families are alike.

Some are so repellent you might actually prefer to spend time with your own.

Yes, I'm talking about you, "Cougar Town."

The meanest promo of the fall season may well be the ABC.com tag line I saw for this show, declaring that "Courteney Cox has never been sexier."

Cox does look terrific these days - a tad curvier than on "Friends" and less frozen-faced than on FX's "Dirt." But sexy might not be the word for her character, an unhappy divorcée named Jules, who, when she's not pinpointing the places her forty-something body now jiggles, is making sex jokes to her teenage son Travis ("Aliens in America's" Dan Byrd).

Or flashing a neighborhood boy.

"Why do you never laugh at my jokes?" she asks Travis.

"Because they make me sad," he replies.

Me, too.

Readers weigh in

A dozen winners of this year's Everybody's a Critic contest screened "Modern Family" with me last week, awarding it an average score of 8.4 on a scale of 1 to 10, with scores falling between 7 and 10.

"Very dry humor . . . sneaks up on you," wrote Sherry Murphy, of Olney, who gave it a 7 and recommended it to fans of "Seinfeld."

"One joke after the other, I would hope this writing can be kept up throughout the season," wrote Marc Malfara, of Blackwood, N.J., who deemed it an 8.

"It's good to see Ed O'Neill in a comedy again," wrote Anthony Holmes, of Northeast Philadelphia, who gave it a perfect 10. "I will watch it again."

Also new tonight

ABC's night continues with the premiere of "Eastwick" (10 p.m., Channel 6), an hour-long dramedy based on John Updike's "The Witches of Eastwick" and the 1987 movie it inspired.

A quick search of IMDB.com turns up two earlier pilots for this project, one in 1992 and the other in 2002. I can't yet say the third time's necessarily a charm, but I plan to watch at least an episode or two more of "Eastwick," which stars Rebecca Romijn, Jaime Ray Newman and Lindsay Price as Roxie, Kat and Joanna, three women in a New England town who first become friends and then become entangled with a devilishly handsome newcomer, Darryl Van Horne (Paul Gross).

Gross, who couldn't look (or act) less like Jack Nicholson and is the No. 1 reason you should run out right now and rent the Canadian series "Slings & Arrows," is a happy bit of casting that could add a little zing to this warmed-over dish.

On NBC, there's the nursing drama "Mercy" (9 p.m., Channel 10) one of the shows the network hopes will catch the interest of "ER" fans.

Taylor Schilling stars as Veronica Callahan, a nurse just back from Iraq and the closest thing "Mercy" has to an interesting character (and even she's bound to suffer in comparison to Showtime's "Nurse Jackie"). A messed-up maverick who'd probably have been fired by any real hospital by halfway through the pilot, she's carrying "Grey's Anatomy"-level baggage. (That's "Men in Trees'" James Tupper as "Mercy's" own McDreamy.)

The University of Pennsylvania's nursing program might not appreciate the shout-out involving Chloe, the show's obligatory naive newbie ("Gossip Girl's" Michelle Trachtenberg), who supposedly got her master's there, but when it comes to "Mercy," they (and we) should probably expect none.

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.