Modern Family is fucking hilarious. Holy Shit. I remember watching the Pilot and laughing but every episode since has had hilarious moments.
Modern Family is pretty great, yeah. I'm having trouble remembering now because I watched all the episodes in a night or two, but I think there was only one episode that I felt was weak. The narrated life lessons they sometimes have at the end of episodes can get kinda mawkish at times, but I've been a bigger fan of worse shows that straight up abused that same plot device (Scrubs), so that blemish isn't a particularly big deal for me or anything.
I got bored of Mad Men (lol) for now, but I think that show is better digested in small doses anyway. Fringe seemed like the perfect alternate, and the buzz on the last page pushed me over the edge even though I wasn't exactly enthralled by the first couple of episodes. Stuff really starts to pick up about halfway through the first season, and the monster-of-the-week format makes things more palatable in the episodes where there's a lapse in plot progression. Especially nice compared to something like LOST, where sometimes you end up feeling like you just pissed away 45 minutes on nothing (Wow, the meaning of Jack's tattoo, how absorbing). It's nice to have a formula to fall back on.
Whoever said the characters grow on you was mostly right. The banter between Peter and Walter is especially amusing, and I think Noble does a nice job of conveying depth with a character that might have ended up being an uninspired take on the mad scientist archetype had the role been filled by a lesser actor. I was rolling my eyes at his bullshit in the first few episodes, but yeah, he grew on me big time. On the other hand, Olivia was wooden from start to finish. I really don't know if she's intended to be a cipher for the audience to experience the show through by proxy, or if the writers (cough Abram cough) are just a bunch of reclusive nerds to whom the female mind is an esoteric wonder. Either way, Olivia and her assistant are both bland, but I'm actually okay with it for now. It's obviously a show that is more driven by plot than characters, and I'll be happy as long as the series has been thought out better than LOST was.
Planning on starting S2 later.
Oh, and what was the big spoiler Saint Cornelius blurted out in a Fringe thread a while ago?
