A sneak preview is out of the hotly anticipated Modern Family Down Under special – and early signs are there are no Aussie cliches left unturned in the mega-sitcom's vacation special.
"Whaddya say, mates?" shouts goofball Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) with the Opera House as the backdrop, before the clip cuts to him in the bush getting punched by a kangaroo as a horrified Gloria Delgado-Pritchett (Sofia Vergara) looks on.
Another plot detail already out is the hapless Phil suffering an allergic reaction to Vegemite. Locations such as Bondi Beach and Hayman Island feature in the special, which could reach 125 million worldwide, and "unbelievably hot" Aussie guys, a "beach babe" and a Crocodile-Dundee type are also expected to appear as extras in the show.
While filming here in February, executive producer Steven Levitan told Fairfax Media that the show aimed to represent what normal families would do visiting Australia.
"We're trying to be very Australia-friendly and paint a nice picture. There's enough beauty, and people are so nice, we're just trying to capture all of that. I mean, if a family were to come here, what might they do?
"Ultimately our stories at the end of the day try to be family stories, and our vacation episodes are family stories set with the backdrop of a vacation, so that's what we're doing here."
The entire cast came out for filming of the one-off episode, sparking a social media storm with sightings around Sydney and Queensland of actors including Ed O'Neill, Julie Bowen, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Eric Stonestreet, Sarah Hyland, Ariel Winter, Rico Rodriguez and Aubrey Anderson-Emmons.
Tourism bosses and Qantas, who invested heavily in encouraging the show to film here, will be hoping to see a similar response to that gained by the Ellen and Oprah shows, which visited last year and 2010 respectively. Airing of the episode aside, invested parties have already benefited from the flurry of publicity generated while filming took place, from the obsessive following by the media to the multiple social media posts from the stars themselves, as they ticked off their own tourist checklist.
The episode airs in the US on April 23, and on Ten on April 27, alongside a behind-the-scenes show hosted by Angela Bishop.
