Ty Burrell

Watch Phil Dunphy explain to camera what he has just done to himself on a ladder. He is not embarrassed. He is, if anything, a little proud, and the pride is the joke. Burrell plays the estate agent who thinks he is the cool dad without a trace of irony, and the character is funny because he means every word. Most sitcom actors play a fool with one eye on us. Burrell keeps both on Claire, waiting to see whether she is impressed. She is not, and his face registers it half a second late.

He came to it by an odd route. For most of his first decade in films he was cast to be disliked: a smug colonel in Evolution (2001), a soldier in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001), the nihilistic Steve in Dawn of the Dead (2004). He has been plain about why: "I played a lot of villains in film and my features lend themselves toward that, so I got turned down for a lot of leading man parts for me being menacing looking." He turns up in The Incredible Hulk (2008) as Leonard, alongside Edward Norton, and our review found nothing in the part to single out, which is fair; it is a small role in a film with larger troubles. Then Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan wrote Phil, and he played him for eleven seasons from 2009.

Our review of Modern Family said the cast was almost without a weak link and then said Burrell was the reason to watch, and both are true. We laughed out loud, alone, at his to-camera explanations of what he had just done, and it was the timing that did it: he holds the pause a beat longer than a confident man would, so the explanation arrives already sounding like a defence. There is a look of hurt bafflement he does when Claire finds him ridiculous that is as good as anything in the genre. Julie Bowen is the collaborator who matters most; she notices and he does not, and the scenes run on the gap. The programme goes on about twice as long as it has material for, and by the later seasons the ladders and trampolines are being reached for rather than found. Burrell never plays Phil as a routine, even when the writing does.

More recently he has been heard more than seen, as Bailey in Finding Dory (2016) and in Rick and Morty, where the self-deprecating cheer travels intact without the face. The worry is a reasonable one: he has now been typecast twice, first as the man you are meant to dislike and then as the man you cannot help liking, and the second cage is more comfortable than the first. Someone should offer him a villain again. He has the features for it, on his own account, and eleven seasons of Phil to hide them behind.