Al Bundy has left the building

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Actor Ed O’Neill plays a dad on ABC’s Modern Family. (DAN STEINBERG / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

It's been a while since Ed O'Neill played a sitcom dad.

And that's understandable, since the funny-show father he portrayed for 11 seasons -- Married... With Children's chronically complaining not-so-gifted underachiever, Al Bundy -- remains one of TV's most viewed, most controversial, most sociologically overanalyzed and most unintentionally iconic characters in television history.

Leaving Al Bundy behind has been no easy feat, despite the fact O'Neill has worked long and hard to prove he's got many more tricks in his acting bag than the couch-slouching Bundy grimace.

A dozen years and at least half a dozen memorable non-sitcom-pop-TV roles later, O'Neill finds himself playing a very different kind of television-comedy father, in the form of Modern Family's second-time-married patriarch, Jay Pritchett.

As part of the ensemble cast of the popular ABC series, which airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. (also on Citytv), O'Neill finds himself playing a past-middle-aged guy with a new, much-younger wife (played by Sofia Vergara) and a stepson who's younger than some of his own grandkids.

"Obviously, it's a different show," O'Neill offered with a slightly forced smile when asked to compare this role to the Fox-sitcom dad that made him famous. "I'm older; she's younger. Peg (Bundy) and I were a little closer in age, although I was older than Katey (Sagal) was. So this is a whole different deal -- I'm a little over my head, I think, in this one, and it's kind of fun trying to keep up."

In addition to Jay, new spouse Gloria and hopelessly romantic 11-year-old son Manny (Rico Rodriguez), the extended Pritchett clan also includes daughter Claire (Julie Bowen) and husband Phil (Ty Burrell) and their two offspring, and son Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and life partner Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), who have just adopted a Vietnamese baby.

Needless to say, Sunday dinner is a complicated affair.

Since Married ... With Children faded to black in 1997, O'Neill has focused mainly on dramatic roles, starring in a couple of short-lived cop shows (Big Apple and Dragnet), the ambitious but underappreciated fantasy mini-series The 10th Kingdom and the surreal, David Milch-produced HBO drama John From Cincinnati.

O'Neill also did a four-episode guest run on The West Wing, and was reportedly Milch's first choice to play Deadwood's dastardly saloonkeeper, Al Swearengen, but opted to play Det. Joe Friday in the Dragnet remake instead.

"Dragnet was fun, (but) it was a lot of work," O'Neill reflected. "It was an hour drama and it was a procedural, so it was six, seven scenes a day. That's a lot of work -- 14 hours every day. This is much more of an ensemble, and it's comedy, so I really like this job.

"I've always found that really good drama has a lot of comedy in it ... and I think there's going to be drama in this show. It's very realistic. It's fun to play both, obviously. It's just weighted a bit more on the side of comedy in this one, as opposed to the dramatic."

Series producer Steve Levitan (Wings, Frasier, Just Shoot Me) said the success of Modern Family -- which recently received a full-season pickup from ABC -- depended fully on being able to cast actors who can play both sides of the line.

"I think comedy is harder," he said, "because to play comedy well, you have to play drama well and then add a layer of lightness of top of that. When it's done well, it's very complex, and there are very few people who can do it. When we're casting comedies, the talent pool is a fraction of what's available to those (producers) casting dramas."

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

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Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 12, 2009 F5