Wednesday, May 8, 2013

TV Show Review: The Middleman - The Complete Series

Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: Wonderfully clever show with good stories and laughs.
Cons: This is all we'll get
The Bottom Line:
Your second chance to
Watch this first rate show.  Do not
Hesitate to watch




The Middleman Was Sheer Eloquence in its Simplicity

As a TV fan, I get used to heart break.  I find a new show, fall completely in love with it, then watch as the ratings tank and the show gets canceled.  And yet, I keep doing it over and over again.  I sat down and watched the pilot of The Middleman on a whim, and I was immediately hooked.  But even airing on ABC Family, this show couldn't get high enough ratings to last beyond 12 episodes.

Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales) is a fresh out of college artist paying her bills by working at temp agencies.  And she's just had a bad day.  An experiment goes wrong in the lab at her current assignment, making a giant monster.  She barely escapes from that, only to have her boyfriend break up with her on camera for a class assignment.

It's then that her roommate Lacey (Brit Morgan) lets her know about the job offer from the Jolly Fats Wehawkins Temp Agency.  But when Wendy arrives, she discovers that this agency is really a cover for a mysterious organization.  The job offer is as an apprentice to The Middleman (Matt Keeslar).  The job?  Fighting aliens and monsters and anything else that pops up and keeping a tight lid on it so that the rest of the population doesn't freak out.

While Wendy really does want to work on her art, she takes the job.  But can she balance a social life and her true calling with saving the world?

How do I really describe this show?  It is part monster of the week, part comedy.  I have seen it likened to Men in Black.  While I've never seen those movies, what I know about them makes me think that's probably a good comparison.  Yes, I'd get caught up in the suspense of the episode, but I'd also be laughing my head off at times at the witty dialogue or strange situations the characters were in.  Heck, Wendy and The Middleman face off against masked Mexican wrestlers, zombie fish, a boy band (made up of aliens), and even a cursed tuba and vampire puppets.

The series was originally based on a series of comic books.  What amazed me when I read them recently was how much more developed the characters were in the series.  Of course, the comic books only told three of the stories we get in this set, so that allows plenty of time for the characters to truly develop.  I enjoyed seeing Wendy try to balance her friends and her new job.  And, of course, there's the constant lying that any superhero has to do.

And the show falls into the fast paced, witty dialogue brand that seems popular today.  The quips fly fast and furious.  Since The Middleman (that is the only name we get for him) doesn't know who it is who pays the bills, or him, he and the office robot/super computer Ida (Mary Pat Gleason) have started calling their boss O2StK (that's Organization too Secret to Know).  Ida is full of quips and one liners, usually at Wendy's expense.  But Wendy can give as good as she gets.  This show used science fiction and super hero conventions while mocking them.  Several of the villains give a monologue when they get caught, often starting with, "The plan was sheer eloquence in its simplicity."  Heck, they even having fun with the timing.  While some episodes play it straight, other include tags like "breakfast time," "lunch time," and "nap time" to show the passing of time.  One even used a different time zone (unrelated to the story) to show every major shift in time.

Of course, the sharp writing was helped by the acting and special effects.  There were some pretty strange things in this show, and I bought them.  Maybe they could have been better, but it is a minor quibble.  The acting was always spot on, and made me lover the characters even more.  I especially loved Mary Pat Gleason who made Ida such a cold, sarcastic robot.

The set includes the twelve episodes on four discs in wide screen and full surround.  And it is packed with extras.  We've got a gag real, deleted and alternative scenes, the table read of one of the episodes, behind the scenes photographs, and audio commentaries.  At the recently completed ComicCon, the cast reunited to do a table read of the unfilmed thirteenth episode.  Honestly, I wish they had waited another month or two to give us that as a bonus feature as well.

Based on how low the ratings were, I have a feeling you missed The Middleman when it aired.  Now is the time to correct that egregious oversight.

Episodes:
1. The Pilot Episode Sanction
2. The Accidental Occidental Conception
3. The Sino-Mexican Revelation
4. The Manicoid Teleportation Conundrum
5. The Flying Fish Zombification
6. The Boy-Band Superfan Interrogation
7. The Cursed Tuba Contingency
8. The Ectoplasmic Panhellenic Investigation
9. The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown
10. The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation
11. The Clotharian Contamination Protocol
12. The Palindrome Reversal Palindrome

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