I really thought the family comedy was long-gone. After its heyday in the ’80s — Family Ties, Growing Pains, Who’s the Boss … the list goes on and on — the family sitcom has been gradually fading from the national consciousness. As a child, I had plenty of sappy family dramedies to choose from, including Seventh Heaven, re-runs of The Brady Brunch and The Cosby Show and, of course, Full House.

But once I outgrew shows that end with a lesson and a hug, I had nowhere to turn. Where was a truly funny sitcom about an entire family? Every sitcom I could find was some sort of variation on Friends — a bunch of twenty-somethings living together in some city, getting up to all sorts of crazy adventures.

The only “family” sitcoms that existed were shows in which a fat, annoying man or a man with seriously annoying parents annoyed his pretty, sane wife to the point at which their union becomes completely unimaginable (Yes Dear, According to Jim, The King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond). These shows always bored me — where were the kids? I couldn’t find any sitcoms that reflected my situation, any funny families with kids that I could laugh at. And now, FINALLY, one such show has come along: a true family comedy, with no lessons and hugs mixed in. I’m talking, of course, about ABC’s Modern Family.

Unlike its predecessors, Modern Family does not only focus on one nuclear family and its shenanigans. It does not focus solely on the parents (like Everybody Loves Raymond) or solely on the kids (like Seventh Heaven). Instead, it zooms out to cover three different branches of one big extended family — a “traditional” mom-dad-and-three-kids clan, a May-December marriage with a son from the wife’s first marriage, and a gay couple who have just adopted a baby from Vietnam.

The ”traditional” family, as white-bread as they may appear from the outside, features a control-freak mother, a desperately uncool “cool dad”, and three kids with very strong personalities. The gay couple, a neurotic and a drama queen, could not make a funnier combination of new parents. And Jay and Gloria, the May-December married couple, are anything but the typical gold-digger / old lecher pair they first appear to be. As you can guess, hilarity ensues. The show suggests that behind closed doors, no family is as they seem to be, and every family has its problems — but this family’s problems are funnier than most.

All three couples are equally and uniquely hilarious, but the show’s high points come when all three families intersect. For example, Mitchell and Cameron, the show’s gay couple, planned a surprise introduction of their adopted daughter, Lily, to the rest of the family. Just as Mitchell attempts to explain to his entire extended family that Cameron is not, in fact, a drama queen, and that he should be taken seriously, Cameron marches into the room with Lily held high over his head, Lion King-style, Circle of Life blasting in surround-sound over the stereo system. Every episode features a hilarious incident within each of the three families, and ends in a resolution of the incidents when all three families come together.

The show, though it always ends in a hug (or a giant pile-up), manages to avoid teaching its viewers a weekly lesson about the value of family, or honesty, or integrity, or any of those other–y words. And, although extremely witty and full of pop culture references, it also manages to avoid tired jokes and gross-out humor. Therefore, it combines the best elements of the Full-House-style family drama and the Family-Guy style laugh-out-loud chaos to create a previously-unknown phenomenon: a truly funny family comedy.