A small fire broke out in the drama department’s Helms Theatre yesterday morning. The fire started in a prop box and did not spread, said Richard Jones, battalion chief with the Charlottesville Fire Department.

The fire department is still investigating the cause of the fire, but Ralph Allen, the University’s director of environmental health and safety, said a malfunctioning prop cigar was probably the cause.

“In all likelihood, it was a stage prop that was designed to keep the stage safe,” Allen said. The electronic cigar had not been working but was still kept in the prop box. The battery might have shorted out, starting the fire, he said.

“It was a store-bought product proven to be safe on stage and it just malfunctioned,” drama department Technical Director Steven Warner said. “We’re doing a little more studying about what happened by calling the product company.”

Graduate drama students Jemmy Chen and Jessica Cloutier-Plasse heard alarms go off and discovered the fire.

“We saw orange flames coming up,” Chen said.

The two students put the fire out with an extinguisher, dragged the prop box outside and then called the fire department.

When the fire department arrived 15-20 minutes later, they found smoky conditions and ventilated the building. The building also was evacuated.

“All the protocols were followed, and I think everyone acted on it very quickly,” Warner said.

After the fire department left, Environmental Health and Safety workers continued to clean up the building. They let students and faculty members back in at about 1 p.m.

“The wooden cabinet they store the props in, because of its construction, did a good job of containing the fire. I think they will probably get a metal one to do even a better job,” Allen said.

Chen said several of the props were damaged, as was the box itself.

“Other than that, everyone was fine. The theatre was fine,” she said.

A symposium that was supposed to be held in the theatre at 4 p.m. yesterday was moved to the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library, but the department’s production of “By the Bog of Cats” went on at 8 p.m. last night as planned.

Following a nationwide search that began after former CEO Chris Brightman stepped down last March, University alumnus Lawrence Kochard was selected to lead the company. Photo courtesy University Relations.

The University has named Lawrence Kochard, chief investment officer at Georgetown University, the next chief executive officer of the University of Virginia’s Investment Management Company, which manages the University’s endowment. Kochard, who was unanimously selected after a nationwide search, will take office Jan. 1.

As CEO, Kochard will oversee the University’s near $3 billion core endowment, assume responsibility for cash management and lead a 23-person staff that manages endowment assets in numerous organizations totaling close to $4.6 billion.

Kochard — who obtained his master’s degree and doctorate degree in economics from the University in 1996 and 1999 — comes to the position with investment experience in a wide range of asset classes, said Leonard Sandridge, executive vice president and chief operating officer, in an e-mail. Kochard was the founding director of Georgetown University’s investment office in 2004 and was managing director for equity and hedge fund investments for the Virginia Retirement System from 2001 to 2004. Prior to this time frame, he also taught at the University’s Commerce School from 1997 to 2000.

“He understands endowments and consistently achieves impressive returns on the investments he oversees,” Sandridge said.

Kochard replaces former UVIMCO CEO Chris Brightman, who vacated the post in March for personal reasons.

Brightman, who is now director of strategy for Research Affiliates, said he supported Kochard’s selection.

“I think Larry Kochard is an accomplished investor and well-known to the University community in Charlottesville as well as well-known and well-regarded in the endowment investment community,” Brightman said. “The University made a great choice … I’m sure he’ll do a great job managing UVIMCO.”

Kochard emphasized the need for a team that operates as a cohesive unit to achieve access, particularly given the current economic environment. He offered praise for UVIMCO’s “very seasoned senior team,” noting the importance of managing a team in a way that continues to build long-term continuity.

“One of biggest mistakes any investment team can make is lot of turnover,” Kochard said, adding that the close relationship between UVIMCO and the University has contributed to it having been “one of the best-managed endowments over an extended period of time.”

During his tenure, Kochard plans to focus on risk management and asset allocation, with an emphasis on continuing and refining the work the UVIMCO team has already done.

“From what I can see, UVIMCO is quite advanced on both of those fronts,” Kochard said.

Kochard also will concentrate on investment manager selection and increasing the endowment.

“For U.Va. to maintain its elite status as a university, it continues to be important for us to grow the endowment,” Kochard said, noting that this is the case particularly in light of declining state support.

He said he will work to increase the percentage of the operating budget that is supported by the payout from the endowment to provide more flexibility to support programs.

A SafeRide van struck a student on a bicycle at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday at the intersection of McCormick and Alderman Roads.

The bicyclist, first-year College student Patrick Monk, was taken to the hospital, where doctors performed surgery on his broken ankle. His right calf muscle was also torn, and he had a bruised bone in his right leg. Monk said he is currently in a wheelchair, and will be on crutches for a month or two. With physical therapy, he hopes to make a full recovery within three to six months.

Monk was riding down McCormick Road from Kellogg dormitory and was going straight through a green light when the SafeRide vehicle, which was driven by a University Police officer, made a left turn onto Alderman Road from McCormick. Monk, who was using a bicycle light, said he “had the right of way,” and the vehicle did not signal before it turned onto Alderman Road.

Monk hit the brakes when he saw the van turn, but the wheels of his bike skidded and fell underneath the car’s back tire, which ran over his legs and his bike.

Virginia State Police responded to the incident, and State Police spokesperson Corinne Geller said her department is still conducting its investigation, and charges are pending. University Police Lieut. Melissa Fielding said her department does not comment on cases involving its officers, and State Police is still looking into the incident as “an independent, objective party.”

Fourth-year College student Ashna Saxena was one of the students in the SafeRide vehicle at the time of the accident.

Saxena said she “heard a weird noise” that sounded “like a flat tire” but she did not know where the sound had come from. No one in the vehicle saw the biker when the accident occurred, and the driver quickly pulled off to the side of the road once the biker was seen limping, she said.

Students inside the van could “clearly tell [the bicyclist] was in a lot of pain,” Saxena said. “Everyone was surprised and shocked.”

After the accident, riders were asked to remain at the scene of the accident for about an hour to give police statements and information about the incident.

Monk has not yet spoken to the driver of the SafeRide vehicle, and he has not heard from the police since the night of the accident when he filed a report at the hospital.

“It was an accident that could have happened to anybody,” he said. “I am not upset with the driver, but just with the situation.”

—Caroline Newman contributed to this article

In 2008, Tom Perriello came from behind to defeat Republican incumbent Virgil Goode for the Fifth District congressional seat.

This year, it appears the Democrat is now the one trailing behind and will fight to hold onto his seat in the Nov. 2 midterm elections.

Perriello will face Republican challenger Robert Hurt and independent candidate Jeffrey Clark, who is affiliated with the Tea Party. Perriello and Hurt are the front-runners, but Hurt has taken a significant lead in the polls. High turnout among students, who historically vote Democratic, may be a boon to Perriello, said Isaac Wood, communications director at the Center for Politics and a former Cavalier Daily opinion columnist.

Unfortunately for Perriello, the midterm elections are expected to attract fewer student voters than in 2008, according to Rock the Vote, an organization which promotes youth participation in elections. The group has reported registering 280,000 young voters for this year’s midterm elections, a dramatic decline from the 2.5 million voters the organization registered before elections in 2008.

Rock the Vote conducted a nationwide survey in August, polling 18- to 29-year-olds about their attitudes toward politics. Half of the respondents said they were very likely to vote in the November elections. Forty-one percent said they were able to pay “some” attention to the midterm elections.

Turnout from University students next week will be “certainly lower than in 2008,” Wood said. “It is a midterm election and not a presidential election. Also, 2008 set a high bar because Obama managed to excite a lot of young people.”

Additionally, many students at the University who do not live in the fifth district are registered at home and would have to change their registration location to vote in Charlottesville, further decreasing the numbers likely to vote in the race, Wood said.

As a result, Perriello has been working to make his presence felt among University students especially, going so far as to offer University students rides to the polls next Tuesday. Students can reserve seats on these free shuttles on Perriello’s website.

“Perriello felt that by registering students he could get some extra votes,” Wood said. “He has been working especially vigilantly.”

The Center for Politics conducts a voter registration coalition each year, and Perriello also has run an aggressive registration campaign.

Albemarle County has seen a significant decrease in the number of new registrants since the 2008 presidential election, as well.

Oct. 12 was the registration deadline for the upcoming election, and only 2,714 new registrations were received. Two years ago, in anticipation of the presidential election, 6,171 new registrations were filed in Albemarle County.

“Virginia is an important battleground state where young people have historically made a difference by turning out in large numbers,” Rock the Vote spokesperson Maegan Carberry said in an e-mail. “The Millennial generation is the largest and most diverse in history, so even an increase of 2 percentage points in a given precinct can expand the electorate and be the determining factor in a race.”

I am writing to respond to Travis Ortiz’s Oct. 19 column (“Scientific freedom”). Although I commend Ortiz for his opposition to the civil investigative demand by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli against former University Prof. Michael Mann, I felt that I needed to clarify a few items regarding Mann and his work. In particular, the statement regarding the “individual realities” of withholding data, suppressing alternative findings and manipulating results — attributed to Mann — is just not true and we should all be extremely careful when making such potentially slanderous comments.

Albemarle County Judge Paul Peatross’ basis for the rejecting the civil investigative demand was the lack of credible reason to believe any fraud had been committed. Consequently, Peatross did not think an investigation was justified. Claims of alleged scientific misconduct related to stolen e-mails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit have been rejected by multiple distinct investigations in the United Kingdom. Additionally, an investigation by Pennsylvania State University, where Mann is now a faculty member, found no evidence of Mann’s misconduct. These reports are available for anyone who cares to read them.

To address the other aspects of the statement made by Mr. Ortiz, all raw data, intermediate data, and now computational source code related to the contested work by Mann are freely available to the research community as well as in public archives. And finally, it is just not true that alternative findings related to climate change have been suppressed by Mann. In fact, there is a vibrant debate in the greenhouse warming scientific literature — largely related to feedbacks of warming, such as cloud effects — that has long since moved beyond the “hockey stick.” The spike in global temperatures since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been described in numerous studies — not just Mann’s — is supported by the instrumental record — not climate proxies — and is widely accepted in the scientific community, even among climate change skeptics.

To suggest that withholding information, suppressing opposing views and falsifying results are “realities” of Mann’s scientific endeavors is in itself false, misleading and damaging.

Howard Epstein
CLAS ‘10

“I am not going to bed right now. I am going to college!” said a pajama-clad girl in a commercial for Education Connection, a website that seeks to help prospective students find online degree programs. Before former University President John T. Casteen, III left, he said the University needed to expand in areas such as online education. “Imagine what we can do in places where we have never been but where our name is known,” he said. Bill Cannaday, dean of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, is currently working to expand the University’s online education opportunities. Although expanding these services may be an effective way to increase revenue for the University, offering online degree programs will adversely affect the prestige and value of degrees earned from the University.

Specifically, Cannaday wants to expand the University’s online Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies degree. This may sound appealing at first because more students will be able to take classes without setting foot on Grounds, but they will miss a vital component of the University experience. Of course, learning is the main purpose of earning a degree, but interaction with the University community is a major factor that contributes to the distinctiveness of a degree from the University. More online classes mean there will be many students who will graduate without ever going to a University home football game, wandering to Cohn’s for a midnight snack or crossing the Lawn from class on a cool autumn night. Although this sentimental rhetoric might appear inconsequential, the experience is important nevertheless. The Academical Village is not merely a place to earn college credit but is also a community in which professors and students live and work together to foster a vibrant academic environment. An student earning a degree online will not have the luxury of visiting professors in office hours, creating study groups or capitalizing on many of the University’s resources. These adventures cannot be mimicked online because e-mail does not have the same effect as meeting with a professor face-to-face, participating in study groups or interacting with peers. Also, these students will not be able to benefit from the wealth of resources available at the University’s libraries that are not available online.

University students should be opposed to expanding the University’s online degree options. I am sure the University would work hard to maintain its prestige, but the negative ramifications of such programs are unavoidable. If degrees from the University become more common, they will be less valuable to future employers and graduate or professional schools. That is not to say that we should limit the undergraduate population to issue fewer degrees, but having a substantial number of graduates who never took a class on Grounds would decrease the worth of a University diploma. A University diploma not only incorporates the many hours spent studying and going to class, but also the time spent learning how to network, balance time, work and interact with professors and peers. Since first-year orientation, students are told to major in what they love because, more often than not, their job will have nothing to do with what they studied. President Teresa A. Sullivan gave a speech to members of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society earlier this semester and said “at the end of four years of higher education, progress is made toward the development of a personal identity. Also, we are more likely to vote and donate to charitable organizations. We are more likely to use principled reasoning on moral issues.” Sullivan was attempting to answer the question of “how can we (the University) know if we’re any good?” She also said University graduates are perceived as remarkably engaged and informed members of our community — both locally and globally. This is why individuals work so hard to earn a degree from the University: It is respected as a measure of one’s ability, work ethic and communication skills. A University degree, therefore, is more than an accumulation of credit hours.

While expanding online opportunities would create, as Cannaday said, the “opportunity to make the University of Virginia accessible for students who can’t get here in traditional ways,” with the time, money, and work I have invested in my education here, I do not believe expanding “accessibility” in this way would be good for the University. I would hate to see the value of a University degree equated, justly or not, with the peppy pajama-clad girls in commercials.

Nathan Jones is a Viewpoint writer for The Cavalier Daily.

Set to hit the stage tonight at John Paul Jones Arena, country singer Miranda Lambert spoke with tableau about her current tour, her successes during the past year and life on the road.

tableau: By the time you reach Charlottesville, you will have been on tour for about a month — how would you describe the experience, and how has it compared to other tours that you have done?

Lambert: Fantastic is the short answer. I feel that I have been on the road with truly amazing artists and learned a great deal along the way, and I am sure I will continue to go out and support many more headliners as the time goes on. But it was time for me to try out what it would be to ask my fans to come and see me play. I think it’s very important to grow as a performer and sometimes that means stepping out from the safe zone of the draw of a major star.

tableau: You’re now touring in support of your third album Revolution. Does it really feel like it’s been five years since you released Kerosene?

Lambert: Time has flown by so fast, but professionally I’m more comfortable in my live show, as I had a chance to get better at entertaining partly by watching all the incredible artists I had a chance to tour with in the past, and partly because I have come to know myself better.

tableau: So what’s your favorite part of touring?

Lambert: When I’m on stage every weekend and people are singing lyrics that I wrote back to me, at the top of their lungs, or when I’m in a meet-and-greet and someone says, “Your song ‘Gunpowder and Lead’ got me out of a really bad relationship, an abusive relationship.” That’s what we do this for. It’s to touch people with our music — that’s my favorite part.

tableau: Do you have any favorite songs to perform or is it too hard to choose?

Lambert: It’s too hard to choose. We play my hits as well as some new songs off my album Revolution. I even like to throw in a few of my favorite covers. I am having a great time playing around with the set lists. It turns out it’s much easier to be able to pick from three albums to put together a great concert and keep it interesting.
tableau: Earlier this year, you scored your first No. 1 single with “The House That Built Me.” What did that achievement mean to you, especially with such a personal song?

Lambert: Authenticity is the vital part of my musical being. I can’t sing a song well if I don’t believe the words. I am thrilled that “House” went to No. 1. It feels like I could have written this song, because I feel it, and I understand where the character comes from. Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin wrote this masterpiece, and I am utterly grateful I got to record it. They did a marvelous job conveying what it truly feels like to lose yourself in the world and hoping by revisiting your roots to find again the simple life one lived growing up. There is nothing like visiting your home with all the magical memories, everything seems possible then.

tableau: Musicians will often talk about the differences between recording and touring as night and day — how is your mindset different on tour from when you’re in the recording studio?

Lambert: I love performing live with an audience — it changes the whole vibe of what’s going on depending on the fans’ interaction. When the crowd is really into the music, the show and the whole experience, my band and I work even harder on my end to give them a great time. I can’t imagine not performing to a live audience. I hope that I get to do this part of my job for a long time to come, whether it’s thousands of people or just a handful in a bar. Recording my albums, on the other hand, takes another mindset because what you put down in those sessions will live forever; it’s an imprint, and you want it to reflect truly what you have to say at that particular time. Touring is more of an outgoing activity as recording is all in your head and exploring your emotions and feelings internally.

tableau: Your sound is very country when compared to other acts that have emerged out of Nashville in the past 10 years. Is it hard to resist popular trends, which may lead to bigger hits, or has your sound just evolved naturally?

Lambert: Have you heard me talk? Honestly, I am a bit twangy in my speech, so when it came to music, my voice just fits much better into the more traditional country genre, but that put aside, I always knew what direction in music I wanted to go for. I grew up listening to traditional country music at home: Hank Williams, Jr., Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline … You name them, their records were played by my folks at the house. But in addition to country, my family used to listen to Southern rock like CCR and Lynyrd Skynyrd so I think you can hear those influences in my music as well. Most importantly, I want my music to reflect me and who I am, and I want people to be able to relate to it. My fans are great, and they have accepted my music and responded well to it so with a little luck, I hope to keep doing what I am doing and making music that I love for a very long time.

tableau: You’ve got a pretty full schedule at the moment with touring, but have you started to think about the fourth album? Any ideas about what it might be like?
Lambert: I am already crafting ideas for my next album, and I’m going to start writing for it soon, which seems crazy, because I feel like this one just came out! Once I finish a record, I usually don’t write for a really long time because I’m burnt. But this time I have been writing so much, just all kinds of songs with all different people. I’m really excited! Hopefully I will start recording in mid-2011.

tableau: Who in country music at the moment do you personally enjoy listening to?

Lambert: Nostalgic country music. Merle Haggard!

tableau: If there’s one thing that you want the audience to take away from your show, what would that thing be and why?

Lambert: Our show is all about leaving your problems at the door and just escaping for a few hours and having a good time. I hope I can help deliver that. I’m thrilled with having Eric Church and Josh Kelley out on tour with me and think this tour is a great package and will give fans great value for a show.

Being a pre-law student is usually synonymous with one thing: stress. The to-do list is endless, including but certainly not limited to teacher recommendations, padding your résumé, writing those dreaded personal statements, and, worst of all, the dreaded LSATs. Legally Blonde: The Musical, which showed Tuesday at John Paul Jones Arena, was a welcome respite from the storm of schoolwork.

Legally Blonde came to Charlottesville as part of John Paul Jones Arena’s “Broadway in Charlottesville” series, whose upcoming shows include Grease Dec. 16, A Chorus Line Feb. 25 and The Wizard of Oz March 9.

The musical adaptation of Legally Blonde was born from the exceedingly popular film starring Reese Witherspoon as ditzy sorority girl Elle Woods, who enrolls in Harvard Law to chase after her ex-boyfriend. The musical, which first premiered on MTV, was a hit that spawned its own reality show “The Search for Elle Woods,” whose winner earned the lead role for the 2008 season. It has also been translated and adapted for stages in France, South Korea, Finland and the Philippines.

There’s no way that anyone could take the movie as any pretense of reality — Elle’s LSAT score jumps from a 140 to a 175, and her admission to Harvard is contingent on a sexy, Playboy-esque video that constitutes her “personal statement.” Theater productions by nature cannot replicate reality as film can, and The Musical embraces its theatrical qualities. Elle’s personal statement video is transformed into the song “What You Want,” which includes a parade of waving flags, somersaulting cheerleaders and booty-shaking dancers. The legally blonde herself dresses in a stunning, sparkling pink drum corp uniform reminiscent of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” music video. And, strangely enough, the musical’s kitschy absurdity takes on a lovable quality, even at the most clichéd of moments. For example, in “What You Want,” Elle sings, “Don’t laugh when I say love / Don’t think that I’m naive / because even a person who’s smart / can listen to their heart.”

Legally Blonde: The Musical takes the comedic material of the original movie and combines it with fun, dance-heavy musical numbers that, as expected, reflect a bit of the blonde-ditz stereotype. For example, the opening number “Omigod You Guys” stars the sisters of the Delta Nu sorority as they prepare Elle for dinner with her boyfriend, who she believes will propose to her. “Bend and Snap,” the catchphrase from the film, is transformed into a rap accompanied by a jazzy dance routine. Other standout moments include the number “There! Right There!” which interrupts the courtroom proceedings to ponder whether one of the witnesses is “gay or European.”

The material of the musical, which is laden with laugh-out-loud moments, is only enhanced by stunning performances by Nikki Bohne as Elle and Nic Rouleau as her new beau Emmett Forrest. I was especially impressed with Jillian Wallach, who portrayed Elle’s hair stylist friend Paulette with tenderness and spunk.

The overly pink, pop-kitsch affair that is Legally Blonde: The Musical is definitely not for everyone. But if you’re looking for a couple hours to lose yourself in girl-power fantasy, this fun-heavy show is a must-see.

The University’s drama department launched its “RecentWorks” series last week with a Helms Theatre production of the modern tragedy By the Bog of Cats, which is based loosely on the Greek myth of Medea and tells the story of Hester Swane, a hardened outcast whose gypsy mother abandoned her as a child. The play takes place in a small, secluded village in the Irish countryside, beside a mysterious swamp known as the Bog of Cats. Carthage Killbride, her long-term lover and the father of her child, is now leaving her to marry the timid daughter of a wealthy landowner and seeks to evict her from their house and take their daughter into his own custody. But Hester Swane will not budge, choosing instead to wage war upon the community.

The play is full of powerful artistic images — it opens with the dark, mythic image of Hester Swane dragging a dead black swan through the snow and ends with rose petals scattered among the snow instead of blood. Just as elements of witchcraft permeate the Medea myth, elements of the supernatural lurk within the play in the form of lonely ghosts who roam the bog, seeking to communicate with those who can hear them.

The set itself is quite ghastly, a mostly bare stage covered in snow, with translucent swaths of cloth hanging down from above and occasional light snowfalls drifting down upon the strikingly minimalist set.

The scenes are connected by musicians playing Irish folk songs, from dark, slow numbers filled with eerie vocalizing to lively wedding dances that give the audience a real sense of the culture that the characters inhabit. The characters’ accents also contribute to the audience’s sense of place, and although the accents fluctuated in quality, all of the main actors maintained consistent and authentic Irish accents.

Laura Rikard played the lead role of Hester Swane masterfully, portraying her convincingly as a complex character full of longing and defiance. Even as her darker secrets are revealed and her actions become more and more erratic, the audience still sympathizes with her throughout. Likewise, Hester’s 7-year-old daughter Josie was played by the young Samantha Scott with surprising skill and vibrancy. In such a heavy tragedy, much-needed comic relief is offered by several outrageous minor characters — an alcoholic, pajama-wearing priest (Doug Dunphy), Carthage’s shrieky, overbearing mother (Mia Joshi) and, my favorite, the Catwoman (Andrew Cronacher), the clairvoyant crazy cat lady who laps wine from a saucer and crunches live mice as if they were potato chips. These characters balance out the tragic events of the play, so that the audience is juggled between light comedy and heavy tragedy so often that by the end we leave the theater feeling dazed by all of the bipolar emotions we’ve been put through.

Although the tragic events of the play mirror the melodrama of the Medea myth, this retelling transfers epic tragedy to a more personal and relatable level. Part-Greek myth, part-realistic small-town tragedy and part-Irish ghost story, By the Bog of Cats is an eclectic brew that serves up the whole range of human emotion.

When veteran sitcom producers Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan’s Modern Family premiered last year, many heralded it as the year’s best new comedy on television. Now in its sophomore season, Family is funnier than ever, perhaps thanks to a newfound confidence coming off the show’s recent Emmy win for “Best Comedy.”

The premise of being yet another comedy exploring familial relationships may seem tiring, but the show still manages to break new ground in the sitcom world. As its title may suggest, Family is not the traditional multi-camera sitcom with a laugh track — like many half-hour comedies these days, most notably The Office and Parks and Recreation, it is filmed in a mockumentary style with frequent couch-confessional moments featuring major characters. But what truly makes Family modern is its thematic elements and the open-minded way it deals with issues of homosexuality, gender roles and wealth.

The show revolves around three distinct types of families in today’s American landscape. There’s the Dunphy clan, a middle-class nuclear family with a father, mother and two-and-a-half kids — in this case technically three, although the youngest child Luke, played to oblivious perfection by Nolan Gould, may not be quite all there. If Michael Scott were slightly better adjusted and a father of three, he would be Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell). Phil is the ultimate unhip dad, lacking any sort of “street cred” and lacking even more self-awareness — while bragging about his texting prowess, for instance, he likens the acronym “WTF” to “Why the face?” But, as so many bumbling TV dads do, Phil makes up for constantly embarrassing his two teenage daughters by being loving and supportive both as a father and as a husband to his endearingly uptight wife Claire (the underrated Julie Bowen).

Then we have Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a sophisticated gay couple with a newly adopted Vietnamese baby named Lily. In many ways, Cam and Mitch are stereotypically gay — Cam loves the opera, and Mitch is a neat freak — but the characters are so well-rounded and endearing that they never come off as clichés. In fact, some of the best moments on the show come from when they are self-referential to their familial situation: when stressing about Lily’s preschool situation in the Oct. 13 episode, Mitch quips, “Leave it to the gays to raise the only underachieving Asian in America.”

Rounding out the trio of families is Jay (Ed O’Neill), Gloria (Sofía Vergara) and Manny (Rico Rodriguez). Jay is an upper-class retiree who married Gloria, a young Colombian bombshell. Manny, an 11-year-old hopeless romantic, is her son from a previous marriage.

The catch is that these three families are related, as Jay is Claire and Mitchell’s father. The ways in which they relate to each other, both within their own families and with their relatives, are often hilarious and always interesting to watch.

It is nearly impossible to point out the star of Family, as evidenced by the unanimous cast decision to put their names on Emmy ballots in the “Supporting Actor/Actress” categories last year (Stonestreet took home the “Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy” trophy). O’Neill and Vergara are hilarious as a loving couple from very different worlds, and the interactions between Burrell and Bowen never get old. The child actors are pitch-perfect as well, and Rodriguez often steals the show with his mature musings.

One of the best things about Family is how it has humor for just about everyone. Each episode serves up understated dry humor à la Arrested Development, as well as physical humor and everything in between. Still, much of its appeal comes from its underlying layer of sweetness. Akin to Scrubs, episodes wrap up with some sort of overarching “moral to the story” expressed via voiceover. It is good-hearted programming that manages to showcase the best of the 21st-century American family without seeming cheesy or contrived. In short, Modern Family is feel-good television that you do not need to feel guilty for watching because you’ll be laughing so hard, you’ll get a great abs workout.