Modern Family (Season One)

How does a show make sense of its tones when its pilot makes a recurring gag of a child’s faulty BB gun and the season finale makes reference to “The Hurt Locker”? Oh, right, with a mostly talented cast working with well-realized scripts. There’s too many episodes to my liking (twenty-two episodes in a show with little overarching narrative, c’mon now), some of the kids at this point don’t have the whole “acting” thing down, and a few episodes take the idea of an idiot plot almost to the breaking point, but by family comedy standards, this is damn good.

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