While most of my favorite shows are on hiatus this week because of that whole turkey holiday thing, Modern Family had a new episode in the bank which thankfully left me something else to do besides wander into the theater for my umpteenth holiday movie review. P.S.: look out for my review of Hugo tomorrow. (Aside: why do they always release the best movies for the holiday season? Why???!)

Modern Family took a slightly different route for their third season Thanksgiving episode. It wasn’t really about Thanksgiving or cooking or unwelcome relatives dropping for too many helpings of turkey - all the typical things we’ve seen in the past on holiday episodes of Friends, Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, etc.

Instead, the show was about dreaming (too much) and tethering those very same dreamers to reality(too much). In each of the Pritchett-Dunphy couples, one person is the dreamer (Phil, Gloria, Cam) and the other is the tetherer/dream squasher (Claire, Jay, Mitchell). Thus the conflict of which is the better way to live is explored as Claire bastes a Butterball and Manny pieces together the world’s ugliest Thanksgiving dinner centerpiece. For good measure, Haley and Alex get into a (minor) accident with their mom’s minivan.

When an old neighbor Kenneth (Josh Gad) reappears to tell of how he used Phil’s positive influence on him to achieve tremendous success in his life, Phil begins to wonder why (at the suggestion of Luke) he hasn’t been able to do the very same for himself. Cue the furtive look at Claire . . .

Gloria, meanwhile, does her absolute sexy best to field Jay’s criticisms of Manny’s centerpiece since her own mother was overly critical of her and she wishes to keep Manny insulated in the happy bubble of excessive self-esteem where nothing he does is wrong or inadequate. Jay . . . not so much.

Cam, in yet another one of his ridunculous farm stories, gets into it with Mitchell when his red haired better half doubts Cam’s ‘Punkin Chunkin’ story of how he was able to launch a pumpkin all the way across a football field.

The episode was not especially funny in an outrageous, laugh-out-loud kind of way, but it was clever and (perhaps more importantly) rooted in real life. Everyone knows where they fall on the dreamer/realist spectrum, and can relate to at least one of the characters’ struggles. It was all tidily wrapped up by the end (when the standard guitar music begins to play, we know the moral is being espoused upon us), which while perhaps a bit unrealistic, still filled me with a feeling of warmth and familiarity.

Overall, a sweet, tender episode. Now we can’t wait to see what drama unfolds over Christmas and New Year’s . . .

Happy Thanksgiving!