Modern Family gets 14 nods from Primetime Emmys

MANILA, Philippines - SOLAR tv’s Modern Family bags 14 nominations in this year’s Primetime Emmys.

The genre has been proclaimed deceased many times but a hit show is breathing life back into the half-hour TV comedy with a mixture of edge, eccentricity and family values.

The trappings of the sitcom family have at last gotten a much-needed update as we are introduced to the funny, extended, diverse, and yes, modern family.

Meet the Pritchett/Dunphy/Delgado family of SOLARtv’s new primetime sitcom, Modern Family.

Ed O’Neill plays Jay, the family patriarch. He is divorced but remarried to the much-younger Gloria (the gorgeous Sofia Vergara), a vivacious Colombian who has an 11-year-old son with a flair for romance. Jay is meant to be enjoying his dotage but instead he’s disciplining someone else’s little monster.

Meanwhile, Ed has two adult kids (played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Julie Bowen) from his first marriage who live in the same town. Ferguson’s character, Mitchell, is gay. He lives with his significant life partner Cameron (talented newcomer Eric Stonestreet) and the two have adopted a little girl from Vietnam, Lily.

Bowen’s Claire has a time-honored conventional family: She’s a stay-at-home mother married to Phil (Ty Burell), who tries far too hard to be liked by… well, everyone. They’re raising three rebellious kids Haley, Alex and Luke (Sarah Hyland, Ariel Winter and Nolan Gould).

So what is it about these people that make the show work? It’s because families are not made up of a couple of perfect parents supportively steering their precocious brood through life’s minor triumphs and pitfalls. No, folks are dysfunctional. And a good family unit is one that can work with or, in spite of its members’ obvious dysfunctions and flaws.