Elegant simplicity: the plight of The Middleman

“I created a show by geeks and for geeks – a nesting doll of influences, references and inside jokes wrapped in plots satirizing the sloth so often presented in roadcast sci-fi: you know, the plots that every SCI-FI show on broadcast TV insists on trotting out as if they had never been done before (The Most Dangerous Game, anyone?).”

The Middleman creator, Javier Grillo-Marxauch.

When your beloved television show is unjustly cancelled, in most cases before even reaching the comfort zone of a second season, it’s hard not to take it personally. We may go through numerous stages of grief, flooded with anger and self-doubt before lashing out at loved ones (“Why didn’t you Like it on Facebook?! ONE more fan could have saved the show!”), but there is hope.

If you’re lucky, said cancelled show might find a proper audience through eventual DVD releases, as was the case with Fox’s Arrested Development or NBC’s Freaks and Geeks. Perhaps your show may even garner a cult following which flourishes into further public demand for more content, as we saw with Firefly ushering in the release of the feature-length film Serenity. However, not every show is this lucky. ABC Family’s impeccably endearing, funny, and clever The Middleman remains one such unlucky pop-culture artifact.

The Middleman is a self-contained paradox. The show itself is both the greatest program you’ve never seen, and an amalgam of every beloved science fiction or secret agent show that’s ever graced our television sets since the 1950s. The show does not just provide veiled nods to past canonical works in sci-fi TV history, but it gives a passionate Wayne’s World-style headbang to everything that has come before it both in print and media. The Middleman was an action-comedy that debuted on ABC Family in the summer of 2008, and ran from June through September. Based on a Viper comic series, The Middleman was written (both for TV and in comic strips) by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who may be best known as a writer/producer for the first two seasons of Lost. The Middleman was smart, quirky, and filled with numerous allusions and tongue-in-cheek waves of the hand to decades of material beloved by nerds across the world. Unfortunately, due to poor ratings, The Midddleman never saw the greener pastures of a second season and remained fairly forgotten until recently. To date, the Facebook fan page for the show only has around 7,500 fans and is littered with spam postings for erectile dysfunction medicines.

In The Middleman, struggling artist Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales) is recruited by a secret organisation, through a conduit known as The Middleman (Matt Keeslar), to battle aliens, monsters, and save the world from mad scientists all within a neat 30 minute block of programming. Between fighting beasts and evil geniuses, Wendy and The Middleman knowingly overact their way through slapstick action sequences, before hurtling back towards focusing on the mundane and tame life of a struggling female artist with a hyperactive animal rights activist roommate. Did I mention that there’s also Ida, an android trapped in the body of a cranky librarian who acts as the mysterious link between all the Middlemen within the super-secret organisation?

What set The Middleman apart from numerous other creature feature TV shows on cable or even the SyFy network is one shining attribute: it was wildly smart and almost alarmingly self-aware of its own absurdity. The Middleman was actually cognisant of the fact that its characters existed within the vacuum of television. For instance, scenes occurring after a commercial break might begin with the title card “exactly three minutes and ten seconds later,” further reinforcing the fact that action does indeed start-and-stop on the whim of the viewer, subtly removing agency from the characters and acknowledging that they exist within a fictitious space. The Middleman acted like a television sponge; absorbing pop culture and sci-fi tropes of the past and negotiating their way through a fresh 21^st century format, all the while providing references to everything from Douglas Adams to Doctor Who.

The Middleman and Wendy speak in machine-gun, rapid-fire dialogue, fraught with so many allusions to comic books and classic cinema, that it quickly transforms into a colossal game of nerd one-upmanship that’s more for the benefit of the audience than the characters themselves (just try and not smirk when you recognize a subtle Batman comic quotation). While The Middleman certainly devoted a decent amount of time to fleshing out its characters (as much as one could do within the span of a single season), much of the program relied on existing as a living, breathing homage to action comedies like Adam West-era Batman or any C-level cheesy flick from Mystery Science Theatre 3000. The main co-star, The Middleman, was the personification of a 1950s crime-fighter: polite, diligent, clean-cut, while as tough as any Superman strip from the Action Comics days. The Middleman, a former Navy SEAL, always spoke properly, going so far as to argue, “profanity cheapens the soul and weakens the mind!”, and often saying, “jeepers!” or “Guns of Navarone!” instead of an actual cuss word.

Likewise, The Middleman spat out unique one-liners that fans of the show (though few and far between) ate like candy: “let’s kick the tires and light the fires!”; “If we don’t find an antidote, her heart’s going to explode like a sausage casing full of weasels!”; “Sweet mother of Preston Tucker!”

With the show’s obvious demise, one has to ponder: why was it on ABC Family? Shouldn’t The Middleman belong on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming or even Nickelodeon or the SyFy channel? In a 2008 review in Variety, Brian Lowry suggested that The Middleman, “could potentially work on any number of networks, and it’s almost too smart for the room at ABC Family.” Eventually, The Middleman’s feature as being the “too cool for school” outcast of the otherwise homogenous ABC Family network led to its cancellation and unfortunately subsequent memory-wipe dismissal among nerds.

Should you invest time into watching The Middleman? Short answer: yes; longer answer: it depends on what you want out of a TV show. If you’re looking for a multi-dimensional program with layers that weave in-and-out of your psyche until all hours of the night, then you might want to wait for Twin Peaks or Lost. However, this is not to say that The Middleman is not so quick that it will leave your head spinning. Instead, if you want to be entertained, and you want to have fun, then go right ahead and get ready to try and identify all the generous allusions like hidden Easter eggs in April. While it’s almost nauseatingly cliché to suggest, The Middleman is perhaps the clearest example of a comic strip come to life besides perhaps Sin City or Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

If nothing else, The Middleman offers you the unique opportunity to see how family-friendly science fiction comedies, or even a secret agent show like Get Smart, ebbs and flows in 21^st century culture. In contemporary television programming, many networks actively avoid the past and try to push onwards to achieve a progressive zeal among critics.

Characters today must be flawed, and neither wholly good nor evil, much like Walter White on Breaking Bad. In a sense, The Middleman turns this logic on its head and purposefully reverts into the campy, almost vaudevillian style of entertainment that once delighted the science fiction faithful, comic book fans, and superhero enthusiasts.

As creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach argues in the liner notes to the DVD set: “our plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity.” The Middleman’s innocuous themes and reimagining/regurgitation of classic TV tropes might seem naïve at first, however, upon closer examination it appears to be an honest and endearing approach towards storytelling where heroes prevail in the end and bad guys are justifiably punished for their wrong-doing.

In a 2009 interview with the AV Club, Grillo-Marxuach – when asked about the potential success of The Middleman on DVD – said: “The great thing about the era of DVDs is that DVDs are like books—they’ll be on shelves, and people will pass them around. Ultimately, there may be a critical mass.” Take a chance on The Middleman. Do what most did with Arrested Development: enjoy it, quote it, and pass it along to a friend to do the same.