By Kent M. Beeson
If you've been reading this column from the beginning, you may suspect that, if forced to choose between having only comic books or film, I'd merrily toss the comics down the waste chute and whistle a little tune as I walked away, DVDs tucked snugly under my arm. And it's true -- I would. While I enjoy the things that comics can do, pictorially, that movies can't, when it comes right down to it, I find more worth in the subtle movements of an actor's face, or the invisible energy that exists between two performers fully in the moment.
Still, that just makes those aspects that are unique to comics even more dear to me, and one of the dearest, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit, is also one of the silliest. You see, I love superhero comics, and in particular, I love how they exist in a world that makes no goddamn sense. Super-powered aliens fight side by side with human mutants and magic-wielding sorcerers against atomic robots and vampire princes. A guy in nuclear armor could fly into Hell -- the actual Christian Hell -- to rescue an Atlantean ninja from the clutches of a demon pirate monkey, who's in the thrall of a Sumerian god. And it
works. I mean, does anyone ever really question it? Does anyone's suspension of disbelief ever falter when encountering stories like this? I doubt it -- or at least, I bet a reader who does object isn't big on spandex heroics in the first place.
And yet, I've never really seen this kind of anything-goes, I'll-have-peanuts-and-gummy-bears-on-my-frozen-yogurt type of world in a live-action film or TV. A TV series is probably the best medium to try, since there's some equivalence between issues of a comic and episodes of a show. But I haven't really seen it.
Buffy, from what I can tell (another embarrassing confession: I've only seen a handful of
BTVS episodes) dealt primarily with the supernatural, with a few mad scientist moments for spice.
The X-Files, which had fun mixing the spiritual with the scientific, still colored everything with the same emotional tone, giving it a coherence it wouldn't otherwise have.
Lost -- well, who knows. And as far as feature films go, I can't think of one, which isn't surprising since studios nowadays demand that their narrative films be so streamlined, it would be impossible for them to contain all the contradictory strangeness this kind of conceit demands.
I suspect that Javier Grillo-Marxuach not only knows all of this, but took it as a challenge, since "contradictory strangeness" seems to be the defining principle of his new TV series,
The Middleman, based on his Viper comic of the same name. It's the story of Wendy, a snarky young artist, who is recruited by the Middleman, a wholesome, strong-jawed type, to help fight monsters and aliens and whatever else might threaten the Earth. In the episodes I've seen so far, there's been: super-intelligent Mafia apes; a living Chinese statue that kidnaps a little boy to the Underworld; a martial-arts master who wears a luchador mask; and an alien special operative disguised as an obnoxious teenage girl. Clearly, milieu coherence isn't the first priority here.
It would be real easy to hate, or at least dismiss,
The Middleman. It's determinedly lightweight, as if recreating a crazy-quilt comics universe was the only goal, so much that it makes the work of Barry Sonnenfeld look like Ingmar Bergman. (Seriously, I can find more interesting subtext in
The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland than I can here.) It's pretty low-budget, even for basic cable, which doesn't help for a show steeped in science-fiction, fantasy, and pulp -- I thought some of the sets in the pilot were going to fall over when the actors walked past them. It's very writerly -- Grillo-Marxuach fills his world with names like "The Jolly Fats Weehawkin Temp Agency", and he loves his ratatat,
Gilmore Girls-by-way-of-
Doc Savage dialogue so much that it threatens, at times, to dissolve the characters into one undifferentiated mass.
So I was pleased to discover that, after a slightly shaky pilot episode, the series is actually a lot of fun. Matt Keeslar as The Middleman is convincing as an ex-Marine whose idea of swearing is "Jeepers!" and conveys the charm necessary to keep such a strait-laced hero from being bland. Natalie Morales, as Wendy (or as the Middleman affectionately refers to her, Dubby) is less successful -- she gets the snark down pat, but her more down-to-earth moments can feel clunky. She's a lot like Amanda Peet (whom she resembles both physically and vocally), another actress who seems more natural the more unreal her surroundings are (which explains Peet's success on
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.) Nonetheless, the interplay between the two characters, the guy who seems like he stepped out of an idealized 50s and the girl who embodies the 21st Century media-saturated smartass stereotype, is quite terrific.
However, my favorite performance so far is Mark Decascos' Sensei Ping, the martial artist with the wrestling mask. Ping is hilariously self-centered and controlling -- he demands a specific "verse of greeting" be delivered on his arrival, and insists on pronouncing his name with a rising stress on the second half, which feels like the auditory equivalent of trying to force river water to flow back upstream. It's goofy as hell, but Decascos plays it completely straight, which just makes it even funnier. I only knew Decascos as the "Chairman" of
Iron Chef America and vaguely as some kind of DTV karate guy, so it was a wonderful surprise to find there was a capable comedian behind the muscles -- he's like Leslie Nielsen in Bruce Lee's body. I hope he returns for more episodes.
Ultimately, though, the secret of
The Middleman's success (artistically if not ratings-wise) is that it's steeped in joy. There are no boundaries in a Frozen Yogurt Topping universe, and Grillo-Marxuach can pull together all the stuff he loves and share it with you directly, with no need to try and make sense of it all. It's a pleasure button, and all one needs to do is press it. My only concern is: How long can it go on for? How long can one keep hitting the pleasure button before numbness takes over? How long before the unrepentant lack of depth begins to drag it down? Just because it's silly doesn't mean that there can't be any deep emotional impact -- Kurt Busiek's
Astro City routinely drops shattering stories that stem directly from the weirdness of a superhero universe (and would make a great TV show, if you're reading, HBO.) That's really the only boundary that's keeping
The Middleman from entering a new dimension of television.
The Middleman is
available on iTunesKent 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
