“She’s like a dream wrapped in a wish and poured into jeggings.” – Manny
One of the smartest but subtlest techniques that Modern Family employs to its maximum advantage is how they play around with standard family roles. Yes, Claire plays a typical neat-freak mom, and Phil and Cam both share typical son-in-law insecurities, but often times it can be the kids who are the most developed, with Alex’s uncanny intellect and Manny’s manic maturity.
For a family that sees so much of each other, there are still a lot of secrets being kept. When Jay declares a statute of limitations on the trouble his kids got into, Mitch takes it a step too far and mars the memory of Jay’s nickname-earning hole-in-one. Phil and Gloria are in for their own discoveries, too, spending the day with Hayley and Claire respectively.
I’m still baffled by the amount of people who find Modern Family offensive. It’s a family show that deals with family issues in a light, heartwarming way. Sometimes, that’s bound to include your toddler dropping a bad word or ten or discovering that your “baby” isn’t much of a baby anymore.
When Alex makes the ever-rare mistake of not thinking before laughing at one of Phil’s innocuous jokes, she accidentally betrays a secret Hayley didn’t want him to know. Phil has prided himself on being the cool dad, but finding out that Hayley isn’t a virgin shakes him to the core. He and Hayley tiptoe around the inevitable conversation by projecting onto Lily’s doll, and then onto food-court seating, but Phil’s avoidance of explicit terms keeps him in the “cool dad” books after all.
Gloria, meanwhile, is taking Cam’s advice to break down the wall between her and Claire. She tails Claire to the plaza, hoping to join her for yoga, but she blows Gloria off to try her luck again. While Gloria pulls the trigger on her plan to bond with Claire, Cam takes the opportunity to embellish an injury and ransack the Dunphy house to look for his lost Tupperware, giving us another taste of Eric Stonestreet’s flashy physical comedy.
After trying to get Lily into trouble, Luke and Manny get into some of their own by taking Cam’s car to impress Manny’s crush. Luke coasts him to the point of no return, literally, then lets Manny hop in the driver’s seat and casually roll by his crush’s lemonade stand while blasting some trendy hip-hop – untli then gets stuck in a dead end, having to do everything in reverse. Luckily, Claire is distracted from seeing them by a crashing Cam, who finally finds his lidless Tupperware.
Some stats and info about Modern Family, “Virgin Territory”
TV SHOW – Modern Family
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 16
AIRED ON – February 22nd, 2012
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – ABC
GENRE – Comedy, Relationship Shows
CREATED BY – Steven Levitan, Christopher Lloyd
CAST – Ed O’Neill, Sofia Vergara, Julie Bowen, Ty Burell, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Eric Stonestreet, Rico Rodriguez, Nolan Gould, Sarah Hyland, Areil Winter, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.