Four years after the conclusion of Modern Family, Ty Burrell is headed back to ABC with a new sitcom. Forgive and Forget, which will star Burrell as a man afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, has landed a pilot order. Deadline reports that Burrell will star as Hank, a lifelong party animal who gets brought down to Earth by his unexpected diagnosis; re-evaluating his life, he reconnects with his straight-laced adult son Ben in the hopes of making new memories while he still can.
The series, which is produced by 20th Television, comes from writer Eugene Garcia-Cross (The Santa Clauses) and producer Robin Shorr (The Middle), who worked together on Peacock’s reboot of Punky Brewster; Burrell will also executive produce via his Desert Whale Productions banner. The series is based on Garcia-Cross‘ own experiences of caring for a parent dealing with dementia. It is ABC‘s second pilot order of the season, following last week’s Shifting Gears, a new sitcom starring onetime ABC mainstay Tim Allen.
Who is Ty Burrell?
Oregon native Ty Burrell made his screen debut on a 2000 episode of Law & Order, and subsequently had small roles in Evolution, Black Hawk Down, and In Good Company. Burrell had a meatier part in Zack Snyder‘s Dawn of the Dead remake, and starred in the short-lived sitcoms Out of Practice and Back to You before landing his star-making role as goofball dad Phil Dunphy on Modern Family. The series ran for eleven seasons and 250 episodes before concluding in 2020. Other notable roles for Burrell include a turn opposite Sam the Eagle in Muppets Most Wanted, psychiatrist Leonard Samson in The Incredible Hulk, and Fur, in which he played Allan Arbus opposite Nicole Kidman‘s Diane Arbus. He has also become an in-demand voice actor; he lent his voice to the Pixar sequel Finding Dory, and the Warner Bros feature Storks, and voiced the time-travelling dog Mr. Peabody in Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and and led the animated Fox sitcom Duncanville with Amy Poehler before its cancelation in 2023.
Forgive and Forget will be a multi-camera sitcom, a departure from the single-camera, faux-documentary style employed by Burrell‘s former sitcom home Modern Family. The multi-camera style is associated with a traditionally older style of sitcom that typically employed less naturalistic scripts and now-outmoded laugh tracks.
Forgive and Forget has been given a pilot order by ABC. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.
via Collider