Mod Fam: Courting Rob Lowe
By John Russell
Has it really only been 14 years since the last all-new Modern Family? What the hell have I been doing with my Wednesday nights? These have indeed been dark days. Thank god this award-winning television show is back on the airwaves! So, let’s dive in, shall we?
The Dunphy clan was enjoying a nice sunny afternoon playing stick ball or something in their astroturfed back yard, when—oh no!—cousin Oliver hit the ball into the scary Nazi pedophile next door’s backyard. And that’s the end of outdoor privileges for the Dunphy inmates. Haley is relieved cause she’s grounded anyway and wants to go read Tiger Beat or something; Littlest Dunphy is pissed the fuck of with this noise; and Dykey Dunphy doesn’t really have an opinion because her totally vital storyline this week involves her randomly being freaked out by the news.
Baby Dunphy was like, “Fuck y’all. I’ma step to that ol’ man and get our mutha fuckin’ ball back!” So he went next door and was immediately embraced in the loving arms of Walter Matthau’s corpse, and whisked down to the basement where no one ever has to grow up and hang out with smelly old girls, and you can just play with trains and watch westerns and wrestle on the pullout sofa in your underwear for the rest of your life. Pretty soon, Phil and Claire got wind of the questionable goings-on next door and decided that maybe it wasn’t not such a great idea for their darling, cherry-lipped little boy to be spending so much time with Mr. Wilson’s re-animated cadaver. So they sneaked over to his house in the dead of night, broke in and beat the old man to death with his own oxygen tank before setting the house ablaze. Problem solved!
Meanwhile Cam and Mitchell were all giddy and excited to be going out for an orgy with all their fat gay friends. But they needed a babysitter for their little lotus blossom, and it’s Haley, who is a teenager and irresponsible. And that’s pretty much as far as that one goes.
Also meanwhile, Sofia Vergara likes Vivaldi. She wore a really fuckin’ fierce red coat, but that didn’t stop her 75 year-old husband—who she loves and has a lot in common with—from ditching her to go drink Koolaid in margarita glasses with his gay son and his gay friends.
Everyone got so drunk and had so much fun being bitchy and making double entendres and sexual innuendos. And Nathan Lane was there picking up a nice guest star paycheck, because when you need a totally sexless, non-threatening middle-aged gay dude he’s your man! And Michell was totally stoked because he’s secretly always had major daddy issues and it looked like he might get to finally fulfill that whole Oedipal thing had going on. But instead Ed O’Neil made a date with Nathan Lane to go get their butt holes bleached, and Sofia Vergara was still fuckin’ pissed that the writers made her sit through fucking Vivaldi while her husband got to get drunk with gay dudes, so she made Jay go out with Nathan Lane. At which point Mitchell did the over-simplified moral-of-tonight’s-episode voiceover. Except, oh hahaha, he was totally talking about Rob Lowe, who he had a crush on and who is totally on a way better show on a rival network! Which seems, like, meta or something.
