Today's American families come in all shapes and sizes.

The cookie cutter mould of man + wife + 2.5 kids is a thing of the past, as becomes quickly apparent in the bird’s eye view of the new half-hour comedy

Take for example Phil and Claire, two parents who want to have that open, healthy, honest relationship with their three kids. It’s not always easy, especially when you have a teenage
daughter who’s growing up a little fast, a too-smart-for-her-own-good middle daughter and a rambunctious boy. On top of that, Phil wants to be the “cool dad,” while Claire is just trying her best to run a tight ship, determined not to let her kids have the rebellious childhood she had. Then there’s Jay, a true guys’ guy who is having a bit of a mid-life crisis.

Jay has found a much younger wife, Gloria, who has become the center of his world. She’s a passionate and sassy divorcee who comes with an 11-year-old son, Manny. Already taking notice of girls and a hopeless romantic, Manny is as passionate as his mom and spends his time daydreaming and writing poetry. His new stepfather isn’t altogether comfortable with the sensitive stuff and would like to toughen Manny up. But that’s only one of Jay’s challenges. The biggest is that people often mistake him for Gloria’s father, not her husband. And lastly there’s Mitchell and his partner of five years, Cameron. They’ve just taken that amazing ‘next step’ by adopting a child together from Vietnam. Cameron has a wonderfully big personality and maybe a flare for the dramatic, whereas Mitchell is the more serious of the two. But they
balance each other out and are already doting fathers.

Life, it seems, is neither tidy, politically correct or in any way predictable. For these three families, it turns out, are not three but one... one big, blended family, with Jay the patriarch and Claire & Mitchell his grown kids. Yet it’s just such surprises that make things so interesting in this window into the sometimes warm, sometimes twisted embrace of the modern family. MODERN FAMILY stars Ed O’Neill as Jay, Julie Bowen as Claire, Ty Burrell as Phil, Sofia Vergara as Gloria, Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Mitchell, Eric Stonestreet as Cameron, Sarah Hyland as Haley, Nolan Gould as Luke, Ariel Winter as Alex and Rico Rodriguez as Manny.