Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet is making a sitcom about truck stops

By William Hughes | October 7, 2014 | 4:37pm

Aux Features TV

Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet is producing a new comedy for ABC, about the lives of the fun, non-desperate kind of people who spend their lives at truck stops. Titled Big Stop, the show is in production with 20th Century Fox Television, the studio behind Modern Family—ABC’s heartwarming hit about a family brought together by love, understanding, and the shared delusion that they’re being taped by an invisible, omnipresent crew of documentary filmmakers.

Unlike Modern Family, Big Stop is being planned as a multi-camera sitcom, which means that when the various hopeless souls who make up the show’s cast suddenly turn away from their friends to deliver a rant or an aside to the distant, judging, cameras, they’ll just look insane, instead of quirky or cute. Which should be a nice bit of verisimilitude for a show about the damned souls trapped in a Kansas truck stop—the hideous, lonesome purgatory of the modern world.