The Ellen DeGeneres Show – Eric Stonestreet “Modern Family”
Eric Stonestreet from “Modern Family” was a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show:
Modern Family Heads To Hawaii
Executive producer Steve Levitan confirms that the entire cast will fly to Maui next week to shoot an episode slated to air in May.
“We’re going to show them on a family vacation,” reveals Levitan, adding that the trip coincides with Jay’s birthday. “Jay thinks that he and Gloria are going by themselves for this romantic getaway, and she surprises him by inviting the entire family.”
The first part of the two-part episode will be set entirely at the airport as they set off on their big trip. “Initially, we were just going to do [the airport episode],” explains Levitan. “And then as we were shooting it we decided that [viewers] would be somewhat disappointed if we didn’t follow through on the [actual] trip. So now the entire family is going to Hawaii.”
Source: EW
Celebrities Stage Benefit for Student Trip to Washington, D.C.
Award-winning actors Ed O’Neill (Modern Family), Isaiah Washington (Grey’s Anatomy), and Cameron Daddo (24), will star opposite their wives in special benefit performances of A.R. Gurney’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, Love Letters at the Westside Waldorf School in Pacific Palisades on March 12 and 13. All proceeds will go towards the school’s 8th grade class, who hope to tour Washington, D.C. and meet their Congressional leaders in May (culminating a year-long study of American history). The parents and students have spent the last three years trying imaginative ways to raise funds for their trip.
“We’ve had bake sales, sold t-shirts, made special lunches,” says Jack Wolcott, a class member who lives in Topanga, “and the play is going to help a lot.” The idea for the production came from eighth-grade parent Cameron Daddo who reached out to some fellow thespians.
“Ed and Isaiah are both fantastic fathers, husbands and supporters of Westside Waldorf School,” says Daddo. “I was happy that neither one hesitated to accept the invitation to do Love Letters, with their wives, who are fabulous actresses in their own right.”
Read the full story on Topanga Messenger
All in the Modern Family
The WSJ has a great article about Modern Family; here are some of the highlights:
What do you call a mother of three, naked under her trench coat that gets caught in a hotel escalator just as she randomly bumps into her father and his much-younger Colombian wife whose 11-year-old son is trying to woo a girl with the help of his uncle, his uncle’s partner and their adopted Vietnamese baby daughter, who was dressed by one of her fathers in one of his feather boas for Valentine’s Day?
The new face of network-television family comedy.
…
The strong appeal stems, in part, from the many different types of characters for many different types of Americans to identify with. “The whole show is a send-up of contemporary culture, a mirror of the contemporary American family and something of an amalgam of many different sitcoms that came before it,” says Richard Dubin, a former TV writer who is now a professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
…
The writers dig into some of the tensions between straight parents and gay children that emerge even within the realm of relatives that love and mostly accept each other’s lifestyles. Jay cares about spending time with his son’s partner, but when the chosen activity is racquetball, he worries about being in a locker room with a gay man, telling the camera documentary-style, “I mean, for me it’s a locker room. For him, it’s a showroom.” When Cameron runs into Jay and his friends outside a restaurant, Jay introduces Cameron as a “friend of my son’s.”
“They have been so smart in the portrayal of what it means to be gay in a family that tries but sometimes fails to be totally welcoming,” says Jeffrey Richman, a writer who has worked with Messrs. Lloyd and Levitan on sitcoms like “Frasier,” and is gay.
…
In 2008, Messrs. Levitan and Lloyd were coming off a high-profile failure in “Back to You,” a workplace sitcom with big stars: Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton. Friends since they worked together on the staff of “Wings,” the writing partners would meet at their office and casually bat around ideas, telling tales about their wives and kids. “We were licking our wounds and we would just end up telling funny stories about what happened that weekend at home,” Mr. Levitan says.
Late that summer, they pitched the idea to Twentieth Century Fox Television, which wound up producing the show (and, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.). Mr. Levitan described a (slightly embroidered) incident when he went into his eldest daughter’s room to tell her to shut off the computer and go to bed, then heard a voice from the computer say, “Nice boxers, Mr. Levitan.” (She was Skyping with a friend.) This resurfaced in an episode of “Modern Family” when Claire, played by Julie Bowen, finds herself, in undergarments, getting ogled by her teenage daughter’s boyfriend who is hanging out in the daughter’s bedroom, via video chat.
Read the rest of the story on The WSJ.
MODERN FAMILY vs. PARENTHOOD
Will Parenthood become the family of choice for the TV audience? Will you stick to Modern Family or finally discover “The Middle” ? With the end of the Olympics in sight, which family will win your heart?
Here is some info about the new family “Parenthood”:
It was once a feature film and then a television series that was quickly canceled but a decade and a half later inducted into the “Brilliant but Canceled” series. Now NBC is giving it a go once again. Brought to millions of televisions across the country (or so the network hopes), Parenthood features an all-star cast of television veterans who are playing one big, happy, colorful and somewhat dysfunctional family.
More info about Parenthood at Star Pulse.
Modern Family Ratings
A hard night for Modern Family with two reruns; Modern Family should do better with a new episode next week.
On a night with no firstrun scripted programming, CBS did the best at 9 p.m. with “Criminal Minds” (1.8/4, 7.3 million). That bested ABC’s “Modern Family” (1.7/4, 4.5 million) and “The Middle” (1.4/3, 3.5 million), along with an anemic “Gossip Girl” (0.2/1, 0.6 million) on the CW.
At 8 p.m., earlier airings of “Modern Family” (1.2/3, 3.9 million) and “The Middle” (1.4/4, 4.0 million) topped CBS’ “The New Adventures of Old Christine” (1.1/3, 4.4 million) and “Gary Unmarried” (0.9/2, 3.4 million). The CW’s “Life Unexpected” (0.4/1, 1.0 million) also struggled.
Source: Variety
Dunphy-pedia – Keeping It Real
To keep you busy until the new Modern Family episode on March 3rd, here is a new Dunphy-pedia:
‘Modern Family’ Fashion
EW did a good job in finding out the brand of the coat that Clair wore for her role-playing date with Phil:
It’s the ivory leather trench by Royal Underground, a clothing line started by Nikki Sixx and fashion industry vet Kelly Gray, who met the rocker at a Mötley Crüe concert in 2006. Unfortunately, the jacket is no longer available.
EW suggests the following alternatives: Nicole Miller’s metallic trench (nicolemiller.com; $225), Bebe’s side ruched coat (bebe.com; $139), or Miss Sixty’s studded trench (nordstrom.com; $118).
It’s All Relative – How ‘Modern Family’ Became TV’s Best Comedy
California Chronicle has a story about Modern Family and its creator Steven Levitan. We really liked this quote from him:
One of the show’s strengths is that everyone has a different favorite character. “Someone will come up to me, he might be a big, burly trucker, and you think he’s going to say he likes the Ed O’Neill character. But he’ll say, ‘I really like Mitchell,’” the gay character played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson. “And I’ll think, I did not expect that from you. I get that all the time.”
Here is another important news:
Levitan and Lloyd will do 24 episodes this season, and then age the family naturally for next season. After producing iconic series like “Frasier,” which ran for 12 seasons, the prospect of doing the same with “Modern Family” is daunting, to say the least.
“It makes us feel like we’re at the base of K-2,” Levitan says. “We’re just trying to make it to the next destination. I think the show has legs, but we’re going to take it one season at a time.”
Hulu Movers & Shakers – Modern Family #20
Hulu Movers & Shakers report for the week of February 15th through February 21st shows “Modern Family”‘s episode “My Funky Valentie” as number 20, guess you can’t wait for a new episode…
Top 20 Videos | ||
Rank | Series | Video Name |
1 | Family Guy | Extra-Large Medium |
2 | The Simpsons | Boy Meets Curl |
3 | House | 5 to 9 |
4 | The Office | The Manager and the Salesman ?+2 |
5 | The Cleveland Show | Buried Pleasure |
6 | American Dad! | May the Best Stan Win |
7 | Lost | The Substitute |
8 | Family Guy | Dial Meg for Murder ?-4 (3rd Week in Top 20) |
9 | Burn Notice | Enemies Closer |
10 | 24 | 11:00 PM – 12:00 AM |
11 | Human Target | Lockdown |
12 | Grey’s Anatomy | The Time Warp |
13 | 30 Rock | Anna Howard Shaw Day ?+2 |
14 | Movie Trailers | Shutter Island (Movie Trailer) |
15 | It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia | America’s Next Top Paddy’s Billboard Model Contest |
16 | House | Moving the Chains ?-13 |
17 | The Bachelor | Week 7, Part 1 |
18 | Archer | Mole Hunt (Aka Pilot) |
19 | The Bachelor | Week 7, Part 2 |
20 | Modern Family | My Funky Valentine ?-12 |
Source: TV by the Numbers