Review: ABC's "Modern Family" Brings the Gay and the Funny

***WARNING*** This review contains some spoilers for Modern Family.

If you tune in tonight to check out the premiere of ABC’s new sitcom Modern Family, here is a word of advice: Ignore the “creampuff” scene on the airplane at the very start of the episode. Trust me, just fast forward through it.

That’s when Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) mistakenly believes a fellow passenger has referred to himself and his boyfriend as “creampuffs.” In fact, the woman was referring to the actual creampuffs their adopted baby is trying to chew on. The joke is forced and unfunny and makes Mitchell look hysterical.

Fortunately, it’s Modern Family’s only real big misstep (although a joke about mean lesbians also traffics in unnecessary stereotypes) and from that point on the show only gets funnier and fresher. Highlights of the first episode include the dramatic introduction of Mitchell and Cameron’s new daughter to the rest of the family (think The Lion King) and a very funny shooting incident involving a BB gun.

The show itself is yet another “mockumentary” in the same vein as The Office and Parks & Recreation, only adapted to the more traditional sitcom format. Thankfully, the documentary aspect is kept to a minimum as each of the show’s three families are only occasionally interviewed in the mockumentary “confessional” style.

Mitchell and Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) are the gay couple who make up one of the three households the show follows (the three families are related to each other, although that isn’t made clear until the end of the episode). In the first episode, Cameron and Mitchell have just returned from Vietnam where they have adopted a girl named Lily, something they have not yet shared with the rest of their family.

Cameron and Mitchell aren’t exactly groundbreaking gay characters in and of themselves. Cameron is a very outgoing fellow prone to making dramatic gestures (wait until you see the portrait of the two men in Lily’s nursery) and over-sharing while Mitchell is a prissy, uptight man worried what others think of him.

It’s fair to say that Cameron and Mitchell might even be a little stereotypical in how they are portrayed. That’s actually all right since everyone on Modern Family – from fiery Latina Gloria to her much older sixty something husband Jay to the painfully unfunny dad Phil who actually believes he is hip – is a cliché character. But that’s what sitcoms are usually built on and what matters is what the show does with those characters.