Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who is most notably known for his work as an award-winning producer and writer on the first two seasons of the hit television show LOST, is about to have his own work debut in a new series for ABC Family. Grillo-Marxuach, whose credits also include working on such shows as Medium, Jake 2.0, and Charmed, among many others, created and wrote the comic book series The Middleman, published by Viper Comics, which will be making its transition to the television series of the same name, premiering on June 16^th.

When Grillo-Marxuach first got the idea for the story of The Middleman, and wrote the pilot in 1998, it seemed it wasn’t the right time for the story to be a television series.  “It was one of those things where what my agents really wanted for me was to do a show like Boomtown and all that and really kind of get that kind of traction in my career.  So I took the pilot and sort of put it aside and I could never quite get it out of my mind.  Like I said, my wife and I were constantly like, “He could be the Middleman.  She could be Wendy.”  And we sort of went through that for a long time.”

Eventually The Middleman would find a home with comic book readers.  “In 2004, I went to work on LOST and I was working with Paul Dini, whom I have widely credited as the godfather of The Middleman.  And Paul has this comic book called Jingle Bell and he’s got this other one called Mutant Texas, and he’s sort of a guy who, in addition to his work with DC and his work in animation and his work in primetime, really has kind of fostered his own identity as a comic book writer and as a comic book creator.  Of course, I was a huge comic book fan already, but something about talking to Paul and realizing here’s a guy who’s doing it sort of inspired me to say, “Here I have a property that, in a comic book, without the constraints of budget, would be spectacular.  So why not go in that direction and try to fulfill this creative need that I have to see this thing made?”

The Middleman (Matt Keeslar) and Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales)

Grillo-Marxuach also believes that the correct timing also had to do with his own changes.  “I think I’ve changed.  And I don’t mean that to sound as horrifically narcissistic as it does, but when I first wrote this pilot I was, I think, executive story editor on a show.  And, to sell a pilot and to run a show and to do it well and to sort of stick true to one individual vision and all that, you need to have a certain amount of experience and you need to have a certain amount of seasoning in the world.  Because even in a place as wonderful and nurturing as ABC Family has been to me, it’s still a pretty dense thicket to see a show through.

What I’ve been through since has been just a tremendous amount of formative experiences that have sort of educated me in how to run a show.  So there’s that. I think it was the right time for me to come in and actually be able to be the show runner on this thing without having to give up things that I wouldn’t have wanted to.”

Grillo-Marxuach also thinks that it is partially because of how his show is different then many of the others on television.  “I think this is a lighthearted show, I think it’s an optimistic show, I think it’s a show that is sort of unabashed about itself and it doesn’t make apologies for being – you know, a show that isn’t tragic, isn’t dark, isn’t reflecting that kind of a reality.  And I think that ABC Family was sort of the right network at the right time for it as well.

Also, when you’re looking at a show that’s this – you know, in addition to being a sci-fi show, it’s a sci-fi show where everybody talks funny, in this sort of patter kind of banter thing; it’s a show that’s very self-consciously weird.  We have a kind of tentacled butt monster in the first show and we’ve got gangster apes and we’ve got fish zombies and fashion models who are succubi.  It’s not your traditional monster-of-the-week show.”

When Grillo-Marxuach first wrote the story of The Middleman, there were already a lot of science fiction shows on the air from The X-Files, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Charmed, but Grillo-Marxuach had a different idea about how a series should be.  “The God’s honest original inspiration for it was I wanted to do a show where I didn’t have to explain how people got their cases every week, because it had become so Draconian to explain how a chef, a woman who worked in an auction house, and a sort of free spirit – these are the Halliwell sisters on Charmed – were constantly running into these demons.  I really wanted a show where you didn’t know who the people worked for; it didn’t matter, they would get a call and they would just go investigate something without having to explain how it happened.  It honestly kind of took off from that.

Out of that came the idea of this guy who doesn’t know who he works for, but his job is to solve exotic problems.  And originally the concept that I’d hatched for the series was that it was all just … pulp.  I mean it was just balls out, weird, nothing was explained.  He fought gorillas, he fought monsters, he did this, he did that.  And Wendy was originally supposed to be the robot assistant.  And what happened was the more I developed it and I took it out and I pitched it to a couple of people, the note that I got back was that, “Well there’s no real point of view here.  You’re sort of throwing the audience into this weird universe where monkeys roam the world with guns and it just makes no damn sense, because the guy isn’t relatable.”

At the time, Middleman wasn’t the character he is today.  So the Wendy character is sort of a composite of a lot of different people that I know, and mostly the version of myself that always has the snappy comeback to whatever’s said to him, as a woman.  And the Middleman sort of evolved around what character would that character need to push back against.

I was trying so hard to write a show that was anti-television, that when I first conceived of this, I kind of willed myself to forget the fact that you have to have a great relationship at the center of every show.  Whether it’s Buffy and the Scooby Gang or Buffy and Giles or Mulder and Scully or Dave and Maddie or whoever it is, it’s like you need to have characters who have a fundamental conflict.  And that’s kind of how the show reformed itself around Wendy and the Middleman, except rather than making that fundamental conflict the theme of the show, that’s Scully’s a non-believer and Mulder’s a believer or something like that, or making it around a romantic conflict, I thought, “Well, what if you got stuck working in a job with somebody who is the archetypal father who knows best, only he really is?”  He is completely ethical, completely Dirk Squarejaw, and he lives it and he walks it like he talks it, and it works for him, and you can’t glib your way around it.

Out of that is where the relationship in the show grew.  Because the one thing I wanted to keep from my original concept was that the evil in this world is sort of random and not necessarily metaphorical.  I think that a sort of trope that exists around these shows is that the monsters are sort of metaphors for the things that are going on in the psyches of the characters. That’s something that we did a lot of on Charmed, for example, is that the terror of the week often reflected an issue that was going on with the sisters or something like that.  And I think, with this show, part of where I was trying to sort of – not reinvent it, because again, that’s another just awfully pompous thing to say – but just sort of rethink it was to say, “Okay, can we build it around the relationship and have the cases be not tangential, but sort of absurd and funny and have the comedy come from where the horror normally comes from?”  So yes, that’s kind of it.”

The series is also different in the genre.  “When I first wrote this pilot, I was trying to define my own voice as a writer.  And I had worked on a number of shows at that point.  I mean, I wrote this pilot in ’98, I was on Charmed, I had worked on SeaQuest and The Pretender and a few other series.  I was really trying to define myself, and a lot of the dialogues and stability for this thing came out of that effort more than anything else.

There’s a combination of weirdness, but also kind of earnestness to the show.  The show is very unabashed and it’s very much what it is and the characters don’t really apologize for being who they are, and they talk the way they talk because that’s the way that I would like reality to be.  So it’s really about those two qualities, this sort of earnestness and weirdness, and if I were to throw a third one in it would be optimism, that I think make up what the show is about…Middleman is different from a lot of science fiction shows that exist today because it is so lighthearted and it is so optimistic, rather than being as tragic as so many shows are right now…I think if you look at Buffy and Angel and Galactica, they’re very dark shows that really sort of follow the very dark ramifications of kind of sacrificing your own welfare in order to be a hero.  And especially if you look at sort of the end of Angel; you know, Angel was sort of a perennially tortured character who ultimately, with his minions, they go off into this sort of ongoing fight against evil, that’s what they have.

With The Middleman, the point of view is a little bit lighter. In a way, I think it’s a reflection of the demographic that it’s pitched at.  There’s a third kind of let’s accentuate the positive in the show and see what happens.”

Even though the idea for The Middleman was originally to be a television pilot and therefore a lot of the dialog is very similar, appearing in the form of a series of graphic novels meant that there had to be a lot of adjustments and changes made before the story would be ready for television.  There were even some changes to the story.  “When I wrote the pilot back in ’98 and ’99 Wendy and her peer group were a little more Gen-X in terms of their attitude.  I was still dangerously close to my years of slackerdom and school and all that, so I think the characters had a little bit more of that attitude.  One of the notes that came from ABC Family when they bought the pilot was that they really wanted the characters to have more of a millennial sensibility, which makes sense because it’s been ten years since I wrote the thing.

So I think in updating the characters to sort of be more like today’s 21, 22-year-olds, as opposed to the ones from my experience, the biggest change is that the character of Lacy became, you know, she was always a confrontational spoken-word performance artist and she was always going to be somebody who took up causes and all that, but we really focused that into sort of a political agenda that her art is really art that is politically active and engaged and it’s about environmental causes and things like that.  And that really came from the network; the network wanted Lacy to be engaged that way, because that’s the truth about this generation that is not necessarily true of mine.  So that’s a huge change in terms of the character.  And it’s really the only major character adjustment that we made from the comic book.”

There were things other than the story and characters that also had to be changed.  “Pretty much, I would say, 75% to 85% of what’s in the comic book is in the pilot, and the other things that changed are things that we did for budget or for other reasons.  For example, the apes in the comic book were originally chimps, and we found out that first of all ABC will not use chimps in any of their programming for ethical reasons.  They actually have a relationship with Jane Goodall and it was very important that we portray the apes with dignity and that we show certain things about the apes and send a certain message about that, so that was important to do to begin with.  And for ethical reasons we really couldn’t use trained chimps to do this, and CGI chimps were cost-prohibitive, so we wound up changing that to a gorilla and it’s one gorilla as opposed to 20, and the Jim Henson Creature Shop did the gorilla.

There’s a lot of smaller changes like that that are sort of budget changes, things that we did to fit the comic book into the scope of the pilot that we had to make and the money we had to make the pilot.  Actually, the other big change was that originally the gangster gorilla was hiding out in a home, a kind of Tony Montana home.  We couldn’t fit that in the shooting day and I was trying to figure out what to do, and that’s when we came up with the idea of the strip club, and it was about 500 million times funnier than it was in the comic book, so we totally had to do that.  That’s what led to the ape being in a tracksuit.

But honestly, this isn’t one of those comic book adaptations where you watch it and there’s nothing there except for like the name of the character and maybe some piece of the costume.  This is straight up The Middleman that Les McClain and I put in the comic book and that is the pilot that I wrote ten years ago.”

Grillo-Marxuach was involved in the casting of the show. Many of the choices were partially determined by the dialog and scenes.  “[The characters] all have a very specific cadence and there’s a very specific sensibility to the dialogue.  So the scenes themselves kind of chewed up a lot of people in the audition process… The casting search was immediately determined by certain things like can we find somebody who can actually get through this dialogue without wanting to kill me and find somebody who is also going to portray the warmth and character of Wendy.”

Grillo-Marxuach was adamant about the role of the Middleman from the beginning, even if finding the actress to play Wendy was a longer process.  “When the pilot got bought up by ABC Family we kept talking about, “Who do you think would be a good prototype for the Middleman,” and I kept going “Matt Kesslar.  Matt Kesslar.  Matt Kesslar,” and finally somebody said, “Why don’t you just make Matt Keeslar an offer and see if he’ll do it?”

Honestly, in the case of the Middleman, I always thought that Matt was pretty much our guy.  In the case of Wendy, it was a pretty long audition process in terms of finding this actress who was perfect for the role.  We’re pretty lucky that Natalie [Morales] came across our doorstep.”

The series is very lighthearted, and because of that they must keep certain aspects real to prevent it from becoming campy.  “First of all there’s the actors.  They are fully committed to making these characters real.  And the discussion that I’ve had with Matt Keeslar continuously through this process is that Middleman is not a freak of nature, Middleman is not an alien who somehow behaves this way, and Middleman is not a guy doing an impersonation of Robert Stack in The Untouchables.  The Middleman is a guy who is a former Navy SEAL, who decided at some point in his life that this is how he was going to live, and that he was going to drink milk, not use profanity, live a straight-edged life.  And lo and behold, the perfect job with no gray areas presented himself at his doorstep, and now he can kind of live freely this way and wear an Eisenhower jacket and be this persona that he wants to be.

Does that imply a dark side to the character?  Maybe.  But it maybe also implies that you can choose to be good and succeed at it.  And that in a way is kind of the message that I’m trying to send with this show, is that the path to heroism is not necessarily laden with limitless angst…You can put the characters in very absurd situations, but – if the characters are following a set of recognizable human choices – the elasticity of how absurd the situation can be is actually pretty wide, because they remain your point of view in it…So we’re sort of taking the philosophy that if Wendy and the Middleman remain likeable characters who make consistent choices, you may not believe what they’re going through obviously, because it’s all so weird, but at the same time you will believe in them as characters, you’ll believe their responses, and the show won’t devolve into camp.” 

Having one’s own story and characters on the screen is a lot different then working on others’ projects.  “I mean, obviously it’s the best thing ever.  I’ve had a lot of fun working in other peoples’ universes, you know.  I mean I’ve had a really great ride and I’ve worked on a lot of really fantastic TV shows. But to be able to finally see this come to life has been like immensely – not just gratifying, because it’s gratifying to write on something like LOST obviously – but it’s like there’s a real sort of validation to it.  Especially because the show has been in my head for so long and I wrote the pilot so long ago, and the initial response to it – people always thought it was just too quirky, too weird, too out there, just not televisual and mainstream and broad enough to really work.  So to finally see it get on the air and so closely to what I originally wrote is a tremendous validation for me.

TV writers tend to be very over-validated anyway, so for validation to be that size is actually quite a thing.  So more than anything else I just feel relieved that it works.  I sort of sat on this project for so long that finally seeing it up is just one of those things where I go okay, I kind of marvel at the existence of this thing and I’m really happy that we’re getting a chance to do it so true to the original vision.”

The new series is slated to air for at least thirteen episodes. The Middleman premieres on ABC Family on Monday night, June 16, 2008.