Sitcom ‘Modern Family’ Scores Early ABC Pickup

It looks like Married… with Children‘s Al Bundy — or at least Ed O’Neill, the actor who played him — is heading back to broadcast TV.

Reports indicate the ABC has picked up its first series of the 2009–2010 season unusually early, and it’s Twentieth Century Fox TV’s Modern Family. Formerly called My American Family, the ensemble project is from writers and producers Steve Levitan (Back to You, Just Shoot Me!, Wings) and Chris Lloyd (Back to You, Frasier, The Golden Girls).

According to Variety, the show “scored a great response” during pilot screenings, “giving the net reason to go ahead now and pick up 13 episodes for fall.” Moreover, despite ABC’s continuing determination to air some dreadfully unfunny supposed sitcoms — I’m primarily talking about you, Surviving Suburbia! — the network “hopes the early series order sends a message as it heads into the upfronts that the net is making comedy a priority.”

A single-camera comedy in the increasingly popular mockumentary format, Modern Family follows three very different couples — gay, heterosexual, and mixed ethnicity — who live in the suburbs and have distinct approaches to raising children. The observer watching the families is a filmmaker.

Starring along with O’Neill as the heads of the families are Julie Bowen of Boston Legal, Weeds, and Ed; Back to You alum Ty Burrell; Colombian actress Sofía Vergara (The Knights of Prosperity); occasional CSI: Crime Scene Investigation actor Eric Stonestreet; and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, a former regular on two recent short-lived sitcoms, Fox’s Do Not Disturb from last fall and CBS’ The Class from 2006–2007.

Bowen and Burrell’s characters play the parents of three young children in a traditional nuclear family; O’Neill portrays an older man recently wed to a much younger Latina wife, played by Vergara; and Ferguson and Stonestreet portray a gay couple who just adopted a Vietnamese child. I do believe I’m looking forward to this show.