Manny Delgado- "Oh no, who will pee all over the floor?" Luke Dunphy- "I was brushing my teeth at the same time...you try and do that."
Is it really worth continuing to read blogs and listen to podcasts by
Alan Sepinwall and Dan Fienberg if they continue to think that Parks and Recreation has had a better season than Modern Family? I love "Sep", as I call him on the streets, for his deconstruction of serialized dramas, and I'm starting to love Fienberg's Idol reviews, but these two obviously need some help on what is funny.
Don't get me wrong, Parks is having a much better second season and has taken a step ahead of 30 Rock for me, but to even compare it to Modern Family, and Community for that matter, is pretty ridiculous. The best comedy on television right now? Come on Sep! I guess you're asking for a lot from somebody who thinks Ron Swanson is the funniest character on tv even though he's not even in the top five funniest on his own show.
First post in which I talk about a completely different show for the first two paragraphs. This is a Modern Family post correct? Yes, it is. Last night's
Hawaii episode was fantastic. Better than
Come Fly With Me or
Moon Landing? Probably not, but still one of the best of what has already been a fantastic first season.
What makes Modern Fam so good is the plethora of characters that bring it week in and week out. All three heads of each sub-family would be an unbelievable lead on another show. This ep we got Cam, Phil and Jay all tearing it up in their own special way.
Cam, as the big, obnoxious drama queen, had me cracking up as he ran down the hotel stairs screaming,
"seal off the island!!" Phil, in all of his cluelessness, manages to throw in awkward one-liners no matter the situation. After he throws Haley's cell phone into the pool,
"It's just the beginning. Buckle your seatbelt lady, you're being woo'ed." And then there's Jay, with that condescending nature of his killed me as he picked up his phone with,
"What's up jackass?"
A couple of things made this episode stand out for me. The first was that even some of the characters that don't really do it for me managed to sneak in a few classic lines. Alex's pure younger sister hatred for Haley was hilariously epitomized by,
"You're not going to like this as much as I do, but she's drunk." And Mitchell, who is the only one on the show that I could ever say I haven't enjoyed, was awesome inside the banana trees as he proclaimed Lilly is
"gonna think she's back in Vietnam."
Hands down, the best part of the episode was the prominence of my new favorite dynamic...Manny and Luke. These two are so perfectly opposite. They are roughly the same age, what 10? Manny acts like he's 60 and Luke acts like he's five. Their contrasting personalities made for some of my favorite moments of the season in the Hawaii hotel room.
As they start settling in, which in this case means Manny folding and ironing and Luke dumping his stuff on the bed, Manny comes up with a plan to meet some young ladies,
"I noticed some lovely tweens down by the kids' club. Maybe we can find a nice spot by them near the pool and send over a couple virgin mai tais. They may be interested in two sophisticated men like us."
And right on cue Luke, in all his glory, emerges from the bathroom with his shirt off, shower cap on, using the hair dryer as a gun claiming,
"I am a bathroom martian. Beep. Boop. Boop. I am from the nebula of the great toilet. Beep. Boop. Beep. Boop. Bop."
And this episode ended on an awesome note (I really wish this had been the season finale) with Phil and Claire re-marrying to the tunes of a reggae version of Eye of the Tiger. I've always liked the heartfelt endings on Modern Fam, and this one didn't have the famous ending voice over that some have felt had to much cheese for their liking.
