Modern Family Review

Levitan and Lloyd built ABC's last true broad hit on one trick: three households, one extended family, and a documentary camera that lets everybody indict themselves in a confessional aside. For roughly six seasons the machine is immaculate. Ty Burrell turns Phil Dunphy into the rarest thing on network television, a genuinely sweet man who is also reliably the funniest person in the room.

Julie Bowen plays the straight part with more danger than the writing asks for, Ed O'Neill spends eleven years refusing to sentimentalize Jay, and Sofia Vergara does precision timing inside a role written to be loud. That bench is why the Television Academy handed the show Outstanding Comedy Series five years running from 2010 through 2014, a streak only Frasier had matched, and why Burrell, Bowen and Eric Stonestreet all walked away with statuettes of their own.

Then it stops moving. From the seventh season the beats recycle, the kids outgrow the premise, and episode after episode resolves on the same warm family-meeting chord the pilot earned honestly. Reviews cooled as the run went on, and the finale plays as comfortable rather than conclusive. The acting grade sits above the overall here on purpose, because the cast keeps finding new readings long after the scripts stop finding new stories, and the back half survives almost entirely on performance.

The camera work never aspires past serviceable handheld, which is the format's tax rather than a failure. The A holds anyway: nothing else made mass-audience network comedy work at this scale during the streaming decade, and no broadcast sitcom since has owned the category the way this one did.