By Kent M. Beeson
When The Watchman last left
The Middleman, Javier Grillo-Marxuach's science-fiction/comedy/pulp-action/anything-goes TV show, our intrepid critic found the first six episodes pretty good, but wondered if its steely commitment to an aesthetic of genial airiness (punctuated by enough pop-culture references to choke a wampa) would ultimately doom it.
It's a fair question. Nearly every other comedic TV show I can think of, particularly those with an action bent, have a core of genuine pathos; there's always
something more at stake than the fate of the world. This can backfire, of course;
Scrubs, possibly the most brazenly goofy show in recent memory, balances its wacky antics with a sentimental streak that would make Jerry Lewis blanch. (
Futurama memorably skewered
M*A*S*H as flipping between maudlin and irreverent, but if Hawkeye and the crew invented the formula, J.D. and the interns perfected it.)
"Pure" comedies like
30 Rock and
Arrested Development -- in other words, satires -- get a pass, because there, nothing's off limits. It's
all about the joke. Michael Bluth's decency masked the fact that he was just as self-absorbed as his family, and Liz Lemon's angst is just another target.
The point! A show that intends to go the long haul, creatively, needs more than cleverness. It needs heart. So I'm happy to report that yes,
The Middleman has located its lump of cardiac muscle. Or put another way: it was always there, and I finally found it.
No doubt some viewers have no idea what I'm talking about, having fallen in love with these characters from the get-go. I can't really blame them. Natalie Morales' Wendy Watson (a.k.a. Dubby) is, at first blush, the ultimate nerd fantasy: the hot geek girl with a gun.
But to Grillo-Marxuach's credit, she's also a photo negative of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, giving us a young woman with an inner life and more importantly, agency -- it's her show. (I think this is the first character I've seen whose penchant for flippant wise-assery wasn't a mask for deep hurt or alienation, which speaks to the show's innate optimism.)
Matt Keeslar's Middleman cloaks his badassedness behind an old-fashioned, Gary Cooperesque demeanor, peppering his dialogue with such outbursts as "Story of O!" and "My little pony!". They're a terrific combo, capable of charming the pants off nearly anyone.
But not me. Maybe I'm a cold-hearted snake, but I was initially a bit reticent in welcoming
The Middleman's cast of hipster artistes and world-saving secret operatives into my arms. It took me several viewings to realize it wasn't the characters per se, but the presentation.
The show relies heavily on a series of repeating gags -- the tongue-in-cheek chyrons, the Wilhelm Scream, "the plan was sheer elegance in its simplicity", to name just a tiny few. And once an episode, all the guest characters and locations are named after a movie. (In "The Ectoplasmic Pan-Hellenic Investigation", a ghost-themed episode, a college is called Reitman University. That sort of thing.) It can feel like being dropped into a Mariana Trench of endless, crushing fanboy trivia.
But like that rat in
The Abyss, I soon adapted to the new environment and I was able to see what the show was actually doing. The show does have a heart, but it's not in Dubby or the Middleman, or even Ida, the acerbic robot secretary, but in Dubby's roommate, Lacey (Brit Morgan).
The weakest link at first, Lacey was never differentiated enough from Dubby -- both, as the chyrons would inevitably inform us each week, young photogenic artists living in an illegal sublet, who draw from the exact same vocabulary and even, at one point, have the hots for the same guy. Her one major point of distinction made her a stereotype I detest, the bubbleheaded activist. (Must any TV character that shows the slightest bit of conscience be a self-righteous doorknob?)
Then the show downplayed her activism and emphasized her relationships with Dubby, the Middleman and the other tenants, and the character blossomed. Credit is due to Morgan; not only did she manage the breath control necessary for the tongue-twisting dialogue, she also began to make the lines her own, appearing less like a writer's construct and more like a real woman.
This was never more apparent than in "The Vampire Puppet Lamentation", the best episode of the run and Morgan's finest moment. Lacey finds herself having erotic dreams about Pip, the loathsome landlord's son (rather than the Middleman, her usual crush) and goes about testing how true those feelings are. It's not high drama by any means -- it's just one more fizzy bubble in the soda -- but watching Morgan's Lacey navigate her ping-ponging emotions was the most affecting thing I'd seen on the show so far.
This progression would normally be enough to sustain my interest, but then it surprised me again. The show is remarkably low budget, and in previous episodes, there was a kind of sheepish shrug to the set design, a "this is the best we could do, please pretend this looks like a real Italian restaurant" quality that you had to bear with to get to the good stuff, like
Lost's flashbacks or Einar on the Sugarcubes albums. (I kid; Einar's cool.)
The nadir was the "big", "sold-out" "concert" by a hugely-successful boy band that gave new meaning to the word anemic. But then something happened. They embraced their budgetary limitations and as a result, the show's economical look comes across as a sly, creative joke.
In the penultimate episode, "The Clotharian Contamination Protocol", Dubby is miniaturized and inserted into Ida's robot body to save her from nanobots that are going to make her explode. Inside, though, isn't a poor man's version of a high tech robot; rather it looks like a rusty old boiler room -- a fantastic and hilarious metaphor, since "rusty old boiler room" pretty much describes Ida.
And it's even funnier that the fearsome, unseen nanobots, when seen on a human scale, look like Marvin the Paranoid Android. Then there's my favorite moment from the aforementioned "Vampire Puppet" episode.
The Middleman isn't known for its gripping action sequences -- the same budgetary concerns that put a crimp on sets do the same for choreography.
So when Dubby is attacked by the vampire puppet's mind-controlled drones, it's a pretty typical moment for the show -- a few punches, a few kicks, and we're out of there. Except when the mind-controlled drones all have
ventriloquist dummies on their arms, we've moved away from a routine action beat and towards something more akin to experimental theater. (Seriously, that moment made be gape.)
The show now has a scrappy, handmade feel, a "hey gang, let's put on a show!" theatricality -- which is just another way of expressing its love for the gamut of SF that informs every second of its existence.
Of course, if you read my column on
The Tick, you already know that my stamp of approval is the kiss of death for most shows, and this is looking like no exception. It hasn't been renewed yet, and the chances look slim.
Please ABC Family -- give us another season. Something as odd as
The Middleman is a labor of love and clearly hasn't been focus-grouped and test-marketed into slick anonymity, but there is an audience for this kind of show. It just needs your patience and support. We don't want to see a good series, literally unlike anything else on TV, disappear into the ether.
ABC Family, don't make us send you crates and crates of M&Ms to show our support, like how the
Jericho fans sent CBS all those peanuts. For one thing, M&Ms are delicious and I want to eat the ones I have; for another, you wouldn't be able to eat them all, either. The only one to truly profit from this arrangement is Mars Inc.
But by golly, we'll pull that trigger if we have to. Save everyone from this fate, ABC Family. Do the right thing, and
renew this show. If you won't do that, then at the least do us one favor. Open up a black hole and let us jump through to the alternate universe where it's still on.
Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.
The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008
