If we didn’t know that they’re all scrupulously honest, one might almost think mainstream media TV critics are trying to convince audiences that the new ABC sitcom Modern Family is a good deal better than it really is. Otherwise, why the extremely laudatory reviews calling it the best new sitcom of the year and even the best new series overall, when it is anything but? See Reuters and USA Today, for example.

The reality is that for most ordinary and thoughtful Americans, Modern Family (Wednesdays, 8 p.m. EDT) will be amusing but also annoying. Judging by the pilot episode, the show exemplifies the progressive mindset, which holds individual self-fulfillment as the highest social value, as opposed to bourgeois liberalism, the traditional American value set, which holds that political, social, and cultural respect for personal responsibility are the best organizing forces for society and lead to human thriving.

Central to Modern Family is the contemporary progressive cliché that the traditional family is no longer the norm and is not the best way to organize families anyway. Thus the show centers on three suburban couples, who turn out to be related to one another: one a husband and wife in their late thirties with three children (a conventional family with Hollywood-cliché silly and ineffective father and Hollywood-cliché smart wife with an apparently racy past), one an older man (Ed O’Neill) married to a young, attractive, feisty Latina with a socially awkward son, and the third constituting two homosexual males who have just adopted an infant Vietnamese girl.

Yes, just three ordinary American suburban families.

Just not the norm in any real American suburb, where despite the numerous pathologiies the progressive culture and politics have inflicted on the American people in recent decades, the most common type of family with children actually does consist of a male husband and female wife of similar ages, and the children growing up in those that don’t fit this rough mold are at a distinct disadvantage.

Contrary to the claims of its critical champions that Modern Family is a more realistic look at contemporary family life, the show is actually a progressivist fantasy presenting a slanted view of how families really work and what family life is like in the United States.

As such the show is by no means adventurous. On the contrary, it adheres firmly to progressive conventional thinking.

Notably, there’s not one strong, hardworking, morally upstanding father in the entire show (or in much of contemporary network series television, for that matter). That’s a calumny on American fathers, as anyone with any experience of real family life in this nation knows quite well. Personally, I know a wide variety of fathers in a great number of different personal situations and income levels, and while some of them fall well short of the ideal, most try very hard to be good husbands, good parents, and good men.

For Modern Family to show only fathers whose own desires clearly are their biggest concern is highly misleading.

It’s clear that the producers of the show are trying to make a case for a wider notion of what makes a good family, and that intention is perfectly reasonable and to some extent quite laudable.

However, in order to posit greater understanding of and sympathy for those who make different choices about how to structure their families, the producers quite unnecessarily portray the traditional family structure as unsound and ill-fitted to contemporary life. Both social science statistics and common sense, however, strongly show that the normal family structure is best for the raising of children.

In addition, the producers’ suggested alternative to respect for common sense (given during a didactic speech by a member of the homosexual couple) is far too ambiguous: love. Yes, love is essential to the formation of a good family, but exactly what love requires in any particular case remains up for discussion.

A homosexual man who truly loves a Vietnamese orphan girl, for example, might decide that love requires him to seek out a loving heterosexual couple who can adopt her, instead of indulging his own desire to pretend to be a perfectly normal but unusual type of family man. In fact, in the pilot episode the character’s father briefly suggests that the adoption is indeed selfish, but just moments later he retracts his statement and agrees that love basically conquers all. Including, in this case, the characters’ reasoning capacity, unfortunately.

To be sure, the people who make Modern Family are talented, hence there are laughs to be found, some of them quite hearty and some rather edifying. For example, the father in the traditional family tries hard to be a friend to his children (as opposed to a loving authority) and act very with-it, with amusing if predictable results. That approach to parenting is ripe for satire, and there are some funny moments in Modern Family that really hit the mark, as when he is shown being carried to the sofa by his teenage daughter’s boyfriend after injuring his back in an effort to intimidate him into keeping his hands off of her. It’s a funny and even rather touching moment.

In addition, the show includes interview scenes in which various characters talk directly to the camera, as in The Office, and these have some funny moments.

Unfortunately, Modern Family‘s slighting of the traditional American family is not funny at all.

–S. T. Karnick