Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan’s mockumentary sitcom is sharply written and cast almost without a weak link, and Ty Burrell’s Phil Dunphy is one of the great television fathers. It is at its best in the first three seasons. There are eight more, and they mostly repeat the jokes.
Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan take the form The Office made familiar, the sitcom pretending to be a documentary, and apply it to a family spread across three households. Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) has married again, to Gloria (Sofía Vergara), who is half his age; his daughter Claire (Julie Bowen) is raising three children with Phil (Ty Burrell); his son Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) have just adopted a baby. Each half-hour cuts between them and knots them together at the end. It is one of the better American family sitcoms of its era, sharply written and cast almost without a weak link, and it runs for eleven seasons, which is about twice as long as it has material for.
The form is the joke, and for the first few seasons the joke works. Characters sit on a sofa and tell the camera what they meant to happen; then we watch what did. James Bagdonas shoots it handheld, with a quick zoom on a face at the moment a lie is caught, and lights the houses in a flat, bright Californian daylight where nothing can hide. Nobody ever says who is filming or why, and after a while we stopped asking.
Burrell is the reason to watch. Phil is an estate agent who thinks he is the cool dad, believes his own catchphrases, and hurts himself on ladders and trampolines with a regularity the show never tires of. Burrell plays him without a trace of irony, and the character is funny because he is wholly sincere. We laughed out loud, alone, at his to-camera explanations of what he had just done, and we did not expect to; there is a look of hurt bafflement he does when Claire is unimpressed that is as good as anything in the genre. Bowen, given the harder job of being the one who notices, is dry and quick and now and then allowed to be as ridiculous as he is.
O’Neill’s Jay is an old man who does not want to talk about anything, married to a woman who wants to talk about everything, and Vergara plays Gloria as loud, sharp and much cleverer than the family assumes. Stonestreet and Ferguson get the most conventional material, a fusspot and a showman, but they are written as a couple rather than a pair of attitudes, and Stonestreet’s Cam is large, sentimental and hard to dislike. Rico Rodriguez’s Manny, a small boy who talks like a middle-aged poet, is the best of the children early on. Sarah Hyland, Ariel Winter and Nolan Gould grow up on screen, which sitcoms rarely handle well, and this one handles it reasonably: Alex gets cleverer and lonelier, Luke gets taller and no wiser.
The trouble is the ending. Not the finale, which is fine, but the ending of each episode, where the three plots converge, somebody speaks softly over a montage about what family really means, and Gabriel Mann’s strings come up underneath. Once a week for eleven years. The writers know it is a formula and sometimes mock it, but they never stop doing it, and by the middle seasons we were reaching for the remote at the first sign of a voiceover. Later years lean harder on Gloria’s accent and Cam’s size for laughs than the early ones did, and the plots start to come round again: a party goes wrong, a secret is kept badly, everyone shouts in a kitchen.
There are 250 episodes across eleven seasons, from 23 September 2009 to a final run that began on 25 September 2019, and the strike rate in the first three is high. Lloyd came from Frasier and the plotting shows it: the pilot withholds one piece of information until its last minutes, which is the kind of thing that show did weekly. The directors include Jason Winer, Michael Spiller and Gail Mancuso, and later Bowen herself and, of all people, Bryan Cranston. The costume department (Pamela Withers, Alix Friedberg, Marissa Borsetto) does quiet character work: Gloria in dresses built for a nightclub at a school fair, Cam in shirts with parrots on them, Phil in the checked shirt of a man who is trying.
Against Arrested Development, which had more nerve, and the American Office, which had more sadness, this is the gentle one, and it sits comfortably at a 12 certificate. Watch the first three seasons with the whole house, and go back to Phil whenever you need him. Nobody needs all 250.
