The Avengers, that swinging ’60s pinnacle of superspy cool, proved that a TV series could overcome budgetary restrictions with a winning cast, witty writing, and thriftily stylish production design. As for The Middleman, ABC Family’s cheerily Avengers-inspired summer series … well, two outta three ain’t bad.
Apparently, writing about a secret island full of polar bears and smoke monsters on Lost wasn’t nearly weird enough for Javier Grillo-Marxuach. No, he had to go and create this TV pilot-turned-comic-book-turned-TV-series-again about a square-jawed secret agent and his comely slacker sidekick, who battle all manner of brightly colored evildoers. It’s about as frothy as entertainment gets without veering into complete inanity, but the snappy dialogue’s nearly Pushing Daisies-grade at times — including occasional, surprising swerves into gleefully racy innuendo — and the casting’s darn near perfect.
Ever since I got hooked on Due South back in high school, I’ve had a soft spot for impossibly wholesome heroes, and Matt Keeslar’s Middleman more than fits the bill. Reciting his every cornball aphorism (“Sweet ghost of Preston Tucker!”) with a straight face and the sort of mellifluous voice one associates with the narrators of ’50s hygiene films, Keeslar’s never less than a hoot to watch.
As his reluctant sidekick, painter/temp/part-time crimefighter Wendy Watson, the lovely and charismatic Natalie Morales is a bit more hit-or-miss. Sometimes she seems to be playing so far to the opposite of Keeslar’s clean-cut earnestness that she comes off a bit flat — even whiny. But for the most part, she’s more than game for the weirdness each episode throws her way, and her snarky deadpan delivery plays well against Keeslar’s unwavering sincerity.
The rest of the cast is great, too. Mary Pat Gleason could have walked straight out of the comic book as Ida, the Middleman’s frumpy, foul-tempered android secretary. Jake Smollett brings unexpected soul and charm to Noser, the burnout philosopher who always seems to be hanging around outside Wendy’s illegal sublet. And the ridiculously cute Brit Morgan, as Wendy’s performance-artist roommate Lacey, may well be the series’ secret weapon. (Imagine Arrested Development’s Lindsay Bluth-Funke with a heart and a semi-functioning brain, and you’re nearly there.)
You’ll need a high tolerance for quirkiness to make it through this one, I’ll admit. At times, you can all but hear the writing staff laboring too hard to hit a certain snide screwball-comedy tone (and failing). In addition, one often gets the sense that the show’s narrative ambitions are slamming into the wall of financial reality, often and with great force.
Each episode looks like it was made for five bucks, maybe six on a good week, with Power Rangers-grade special effects and (aside from Wendy and Lacey’s well-decorated apartment, and Middleman HQ) sets that seem threadbare even by cable-drama standards. I could forgive the series for not quite living up to the lush, energetic artwork of Les McClaine, co-creator of the series’ comic book incarnation, but man, it doesn’t even come close. Grillo-Marxuach and his production team are clearly Avengers fans — heck, Jeremiah Chechick, director of the infamous 1999 Avengers movie, directed the pilot and helps produce the show — so hopefully they can take some cues from that show’s artful camera angles and industrious raiding of the studio prop department.
But for all its budgetary failings, this is still a series in which tracksuited mobster gorillas wield machine guns in the service of a mad scientist; reformed succubi staff a high-fashion design agency; and a huffy martial-arts master fights a blood feud against an army of evil luchadores and their giant laser. So basically, I can’t not recommend it.
The Middleman is fun, fizzy summer entertainment, with a brain in its head and tongue firmly in cheek. When it comes to killing time in a thoroughly pleasant fashion, these superspies definitely accomplish their mission.
Watch past episodes of The Middleman on ABC Family’s teenager-infested website, or tune in Monday nights at 10 ET.
Temporarily unboning myself to let you know about the two funniest shows airing on TV these days.
In a not-remotely shocking turnabout, they both come from the UK and are airing on BBC America here in the colonies.
The first is That Mitchell & Webb Look, which is a hilarious sketch comedy show starring the British comedy duo of, you guessed it, Mitchell and Webb. There are recurring bits that are run into the ground with remarkable variation (“Numberwang” is an inexplicable game show along the lines of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” or “The Weakest Link”; Drunken Snooker announcers go off on bizarre tangents; the host of “Big Talk” stands in for every “issues” talk-show blowhard who ever lived).
The show’s more lucid than Monty Python without being as pedestrian as, oh, Saturday Night Live. Yes, the accents help, but the show’s funny regardless of your status as an Anglophile. My favorite Mitchell and Webb bit might be the one featuring BBC news anchors who are forced to insert interactive features (“e-mail us your comments!”) into every aspect of their newscast. So funny, yet so piercingly accurate.
And for anyone who’s watched Fox Sports, you’ll find this parody of its UK counterpart (Sky Sports) extremely perceptive:
The other show, while not technically a comedy, has made me laugh more than any single TV show this year. It’s Top Gear, and I realize that I’m a bit late to the game with this one. But seriously, don’t let the fact that this is a British TV show about cars put you off. The cars are secondary. I’m about as far as you can get from being a “car guy,” and Top Gear has rapidly become must-see viewing for me.
The show’s hosts are incredibly enthusiastic about the subject matter, and I’m willing to watch just about anything that projects genuine excitement about whatever topic it’s covering. You can’t manufacture that enthusiasm; it’s got to come from the heart. And Top Gear has it. A great sense of humor, a refusal to take anything seriously, and three hosts who have a perfect, lightning-in-a-bottle rapport with one another.
The segment that made me laugh the hardest involved creating stretch limousines out of improbable cars. It’s got the same kind of mad energy that the early days of Junkyard Wars had.
So if you’re looking to break out of the summer TV doldrums with some light, fun entertainment, point those DVRs to BBC America for That Mitchell & Webb Look and Top Gear.
A friend of mine, Dorian, likes to keep me around because I know a lot of weird stuff and he likes learning about weird stuff. For example, his wife mentioned that he was trying to grow apple trees from seeds — why I can’t imagine, except he’s a health nut and he wants to grow his own organic food in his backyard. (The fact that his backyard is in New Jersey, ground zero for the Industrial Revolution in America, and therefore probably as contaminated as Chernobyl, doesn’t seem to bother him.) So he wanted to grow his own apple tree from seeds, but he didn’t know — and I could tell him — that apple trees don’t breed true. In other words, you can’t get a tree that bears edible fruit from the seeds of an edible apple. Not to mention that, if the apple is a hybrid variety, the fruit is sterile anyway. So your chances of getting a tree aren’t very good, and if you do get a tree, they’re hard to care for, and finally, the tree probably won’t yield good fruit. Apple trees are propagated through cutting and grafting.
Yes, Dorian loves having someone around who can tell him these things. Why can I do this? Um, I read a lot.
After I told him about the apples last Saturday, he suddenly asked me, “Have you heard of James Burke?”
Of course I have. James Burke is the guy who made Connections, one of the greatest science shows of all time. I even had Connections 2 on video until one day when I realized I didn’t own a VCR any more, so I donated it to my local library.
Dorian said he’d like the Connections series (of which there are three) on DVD to watch while he rides his exercise bike. He can’t use videotapes because his VCR isn’t on the TV in front of the bike, and neither is his computer. So he needs DVDs, but apparently the sets are out of print or something. So I downloaded 1 and 2 to burn him some copies.
I put on the first episode to make sure the download was okay. I was surprised to discover that Burke introduces the series from the plaza between the World Trade Center towers. Whoa. Very unsettling to see everything intact like that, especially since I was just thinking the other day that I still can’t quite grasp the shape of the streets downtown; I can still picture the World Trade so clearly.
Then I burned the DVD with the first three episodes. When it was done, I threw it in my DVD player to test it, and it seemed okay. Then I skipped ahead to the third episode, and scanned ahead at random, to make sure the audio was in sync (I’ve had that problem before). The show picked up with Burke in a field opening a suitcase and explaining that it was a suitcase nuclear weapon which could be set off in downtown Anywhere and what a nightmare that is.
Yeesh. I didn’t remember that James Burke was so frigging upbeat. First he films at the World Trade Center, then he tells us we’re all going to be nuked.
Of course, because of this week’s Idol Gives Back spectacular (which I didn’t watch, preferring the excitement of a taut baseball game), American Idol won’t actually be down to seven contestants until tonight, a rare Thursday elimination show.
Which reveals that CNN’s home page, or at least the part that promotes corporate publishing sibling Entertainment Weekly’s American Idol coverage, is automated. And every Thursday, up pops a link — decremented by one, there’s a good computer — to the latest outing.
I guess I assumed that the home page of a news website would be edited by humans. But perhaps I’m just a 20th Century guy at heart.
You have to learn one important lesson at some point, if you’re a geek like me, lest you risk becoming the sort of sweaty, beer-gutted miscreant found haunting second-tier comic book conventions in a ratty Green Lantern t-shirt, debating the relative power levels of Superman and the Hulk with pathological fervor. You have to learn that there is stuff out there based on things you like, but it’s not made for you — and that’s perfectly fine.
Comic book fan that I am, I was mildly appalled when the Teen Titans cartoon show came out a few years back — not because I was any big fan of the comic book series on which it was based, but because it seemed so silly and juvenile compared to the more all-ages Justice League Unlimited airing at the time. But the more I watched the show, the more I realized that it wasn’t bad. It was just designed for people much younger than me. And in that light, it was actually a really good show, stylish and big-hearted and filled with gentle, un-preachy lessons that kids might actually use.
The Sarah Jane Adventures is similar — a spinoff of the more family-oriented Doctor Who, soon to join its older sibling on the SciFi Channel, that’s unabashedly aimed at younger viewers. (How fantastic is it, by the way, that the same middle-budget British sci-fi institution can spawn both the decidedly R-rated Torchwood and this very PG bit of fun?) Adults who insist on watching it should expect a lot more silliness, considerably less menace, and a higher quotient of fart jokes. Still, based on the pilot and the first episode, The Sarah Jane Adventures is well worth watching, especially as a family. Beneath all the kid-friendly fun, there’s a rather sweet and almost haunting exploration of the ways that kids and adults aren’t so different.
Reprising her role from both the original Who series and the new show, Elisabeth Sladen is Sarah Jane Smith, a former companion of the Doctor’s. Though she was unceremoniously dumped back in reality, Sarah Jane never gave up the good fight against monsters and aliens. In the new show, she’s the enigmatic next-door neighbor to a precocious 13-year-old girl named Maria (Yasmin Paige), who stumbles into Sarah Jane’s weird world of wonders and stubbornly refuses to leave. That turns out to be a good thing for both parties. Maria swiftly needs help in dealing with a sinister soda, Bubble Shock, whose omnipresent ads seem to have all her classmates enthralled. And Sarah Jane, much like her time-travelling mentor, is realizing that fighting secret invasions and impossible evils is a lot lonelier and emptier than it might seem. As they investigate the Bubble Shock factory and its extraterrestrial owners, Sarah Jane and Maria also meet a mysterious boy, Luke, (Tommy Knight) with a prodigious intellect and absolutely no knowledge of the real world.
Not exactly sophisticated stuff, true, but it’s fun. The kids aren’t Haley Joel Osment-caliber actors, but they give decent performances, and their characters are written with intelligence and sympathy. The pilot takes great pleasure in skewering Bubble Shock’s slick, predatory marketing tactics, and the way its young consumers shrug off any concerns about the drink by noting that the label says it’s “100% organic.” Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny in the Pierce Brosnan era of 007 films) makes a wonderfully icy villainess, the special effects walk that fine line between impressive and cheesy, and much of the humor is actually funny, if only in a way that your inner 11-year-old can fully enjoy. (The first episode of the regular series involves the return of Who’s zipper-headed, perpetually gassy Slitheen, made a bit less creepy and a bit more flatulent for younger viewers. Consider yourself warned.)
But the show really shines in the surprising amount of depth it lends to Sarah Jane herself. Sladen’s a warm and charismatic actress, and the writers give her a truly meaty role to play. Like her new young friends, Sarah Jane’s lonely and adrift, trying to figure out who she’s going to be as she gets older. In the first episode of the regular series, she has as much to learn about being Luke’s new adoptive mum as Luke does about fitting in at school. On American TV, it’s rare to see a middle-aged female character given such dimension. (Heck, it’s rare to see any female character acknowledge or act like they’re middle-aged.) As part of a kids’ show, it’s downright remarkable, and really quite touching. There’s also a subtle running joke about Maria’s newly divorced dad having something of a crush on Sarah Jane, which seems like a nice nod to Sladen’s days as a geek goddess on the original series.
I wish that a bizarre tangle of rights issues hadn’t kept sidekick K-9 from more than a cameo appearance. Honestly, is there any television series that couldn’tuse more of a smartass tin dog with a laser in his nose? Still, it’s a nice fix for Who fans eagerly awaiting the upcoming fourth season. Just be prepared to feel a little weird, and maybe a bit silly, if you’re watching it without any kids around.
The Sarah Jane Adventures premieres Friday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. ET on SciFi.
