Modern Family ended earlier this year after eleven seasons, capping a primetime run that relatively few scripted shows get to reach, and star Sarah Hyland is no doubt hoping that the rest of her career is filled with similar successes. Perhaps we'll all soon get to find out, as Hyland has now landed her first big Modern Family follow-up project, and she'll once again be teaming up with her former TV father Ty Burrell.
It looks like Sarah Hyland will be sticking with familiar territory at ABC for the in-development comedy Yours, Mine & Paul, which is set to be a multi-camera project, as opposed to the single-camera format that Modern Family took. The story follows Sarah Hyland as Lauren, an impulse-happy millennial who isn't quite as life-informed as she believes. She gets caught up in quite the uncomfortable situation when she says yes to becoming a surrogate for her best friend Paul and his husband Xander. For one, the series' very first scene would feature Paul's death, and for another, it would soon be revealed that Lauren and Xander totally hate each other's guts.
In fact, part of the reason why Sarah Hyland's Lauren agreed to the surrogate deal is because she wanted to pull Paul's attention away from Xander (which is a wildly outside-the-box approach). That same part of Lauren was intrigued by the idea of spending those nine months of pregnancy as the center of attention in general, and that in the end, taking care of the child would be someone else's responsibility. But after Paul dies, Lauren has to face the likelihood that she will not only be a full-time mother, but she'll be co-parenting with someone she loathes. I really feel sorry for the kid in this situation.
Interestingly enough, Sarah Hyland had previously spoken about being somewhat disappointed with the final season of Modern Family for setting her character Haley up with stereotypical TV motherhood plots, rather than changing the storytelling up. One has to assume that Yours, Mine & Paul writer Julia Meltzer, who is also a co-EP, must have really nailed it in a way that made going through another sitcom pregnancy worth it for Hyland.
Yours, Mine & Paul will have Ty Burrell on board as an executive producer, though we can always hope that he'll pop up for an on-screen cameo if the project gets picked up to series. This marks the first sale for Burrell's recently established production company Desert Whale Prods., which has a first-look deal with 20th Century Fox TV. According to Deadline, the project has gotten a lot of attention with Burrell shopping it around, and ABC was reportedly quite happy to lock it down, especially with the fan-favorite Sarah Hyland front and center.
Of course, Modern Family isn't the only TV project that Sarah Hyland has kept herself busy with in the past decade. In the past few years, she's made limited appearances in a wide variety of shows, from Shadowhunters to Veronica Mars to the Dirty Dancing TV movie to RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. On the big screen, she'd most recently starred in and executive produced the 2019 romantic comedy The Wedding Year. It's not clear if this project's existence means that Hyland's previously announced comedy with Emily V. Gordon isn't happening anymore.
For now, it's not clear when Yours, Mine & Paul will be moving forward with its production, given the state of things. But stay tuned to CinemaBlend for more casting news, and head to our Fall 2020 TV premiere schedule to see what shows are hitting primetime and beyond in the next few months.
