Modern Family - The Complete First Season (Blu-ray)

Written by Pirata Hermosa

A new comedy on ABC that looks into the lives of today’s typical modern family. Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) is the patriarch of the family and has two adult children. He lives with his new and much younger Columbian wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara) and her son Manny (Rico Rodriguez) who considers himself a modern-day Casanova

His son Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) lives with his boyfriend Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) and the two have adopted a little Vietnamese girl named Lily. Mitchell feels that he is a disappointment to his father and is always trying to prove his manliness in order to impress him.

His daughter Claire (Julie Bowen) lives with her not-so-bright husband Phil (Ty Burrell) and their three children. Claire is always in a competition with her brother Mitchell since she is daddy’s favorite.

While the main theme is about having a blended family filled with all kinds of different people, it also breaks itself down into the three smaller familial groups. And even though they are all distinct with different personalities, each of those three subsets has one character that tends to be the center of the smaller group.

Manny is the catalyst for Jay and Gloria, with Manny sometimes being more of the adult than they are. In Mitchell’s group, Cameron seems to dominate with his ability to be the Jack-of-all-trades. One minute he is sensitive, the next he’s threatening to beat up a guy harassing Mitchell, another he’s Fizbo the clown or playing drums in a rock band. In the final group it’s Phil who draws all the attention. He thinks he’s the cool, hip, understanding parent as he bumbles and stumbles around looking more the fool than anything, but fortunately, he has a big heart which makes him very likeable.

Most of the time the show is shot from a perspective much like you are watching a documentary as opposed to a fixed camera angle prevalent in many sitcoms. It also breaks through the fourth wall as each of the family members does “Couch Confessionals” and speaks directly to the audience.

Each 50 GB Dual Layer Blu-ray disc comes with a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and is shown woth a 1.78:1 Widescreen ratio. The biggest issue that I had was with disc three in the set. While the others were very clear and bright, disc three seemed to run a little darker than the others. Along with the slower loading speed from the formatting that all of the discs had, disc three took even longer and had to be reinserted for it to work.

Each disc has Deleted, Extended and Alternate scenes. These extras are so good that it would have been nice to see them actually inserted into the episodes on the Blu-ray to give it a little more context instead of having to watch them in a special features section.

There are also several more features that include the typical Gag Reel, discussions with the cast on what they were doing before, and the making of two specific episodes, “Family Portrait” and “Hawaii”.

For being a new show, there are quite a few celebrities in the first season. Shelly Long, Elizabeth Banks, Edward Norton, and Minnie Driver are just a few to make guest appearances. The show recently won several Emmy awards for a comedy series, and rightfully deserves every one of them as each episode has a number of laugh-out-loud moments. It is certainly a must-see event every Wednesday night.