By Jamie Ruby

http://scifivision.com

http://middlecast.livejournal.com

 The Middleman is like no other show on television.  It’s science fiction with a healthy dose of comedy, coupled with a great cast of characters and wacky storylines; many fans have fallen in love with the show. The Middleman was a hit at Comic-con in San Diego this summer.  There were fans in the audience shouting out “Art Crawl” like the characters in show, which was spawned by the episode The Flying Fish Zombification penned by the talented Andy Reaser.

The Flying Fish Zombification, the fifth episode of the season, involves trout eating undead, where as The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation, the tenth episode, also written by Reaser, revolves around vampire possessed puppets. Both episodes provide some of the best laughs of the season.

Reaser had been writing for ABC Family before he became involved with the show.  “I wrote some webisodes and I wrote an episode of their show, Wildfire, and I had written some pilots that they did not produce but were pretty happy with, and after the strike The Middleman started staffing.  I think it really was one of the first new shows to be up and running after the strike…Javi [Javier Grillo-Marxuach] met with me and I guess we hit it off, and he hired me. So really, the stars totally aligned…I could not have found a better home for myself or with my own sensibilities and interests, and I’m really glad I worked it out.”

Reaser immensely enjoys getting his ideas on screen.  “Honestly I can’t imagine wanting anything more than that. It’s a blast. Especially when it’s something totally insane…I think the most fun that you’ll ever have is when you write a script and you’ve gone through all the production meetings and you’ve made all the changes, you know for budgetary reasons or whatever…and then finally all of that’s kind of behind you and the script is pretty much where it needs to be. And then you have the read-through and the cast comes in and everybody’s reading and everybody’s laughing and you know you get to read a part maybe as a writer if something hasn’t been cast yet. To me that is really just the pinnacle of pure joy. And I mean being on the set is a blast too. Even though it can be a little more stressful because you know you have to make sure that everything gets accomplished, and it’s very tricky, and a lot of people are working hard, and there’s a lot of schedules involved, but that read-through is really just a blissful, blissful thing.”

The writer also gets enjoyment from his coworkers.  “Everybody on the cast is just awesome, I mean, I have not had problems with anybody. And they all take their jobs very seriously and everybody seems to know that we’re working on a show that’s special, and you know it’s a long shot that it even sort of made it on the air anyway, so we’re just loving the heck out of it as long as we can.”

Working on The Middleman has different challenges than writing for other television shows.  “This is probably the least challenging show I’ve worked on, because the sensibility in the sense of humor I feel is sort of right up my alley. So honestly, the hardest part is probably dealing with the guilt that I have for being so lucky to work in a place that I like so much…I mean there’s definitely some technical aspects you have to get used to, as far as only putting one space after your periods when you’re writing.  [Those] are sort of the stylistic things of the show.  Otherwise, I think working on a pilot is kind of challenging, because you know nobody really knows at first what the show is, and everybody kind of thinks that they know what it should be, and it hasn’t ever really come on, so nobody knows if they’re right or not…And the long hours, and really quick sometimes you have to throw out a story and turn it around really quick, and I think that might be a little less common on a show that’s in its fifth or sixth season, because people know the routine a little better, but even so, for a pilot I think we’ve had it pretty good.  We don’t stay that late, and you know ABC Family’s been really terrific to work for they…The process has really been pretty joyful, I have to say.”

There were some particular challenges when it came to bringing the show from comic book to screen, especially with the character of Noser (played by Jake Smollett), who is prominently featured in both of Reaser’s episodes.  “Noser was, I think, the biggest challenge coming from the comic to the show, because what was real in the comic was only defined in that certain way, and trying to figure out what we wanted to do with his character, that was the biggest sort of leap.  Everybody else I think we had a pretty good sense of who they were, but we knew that we didn’t want to have Jake there every episode doing the song lyrics.  Even though that’s fun and funny and it worked, you know he definitely needed more to do, so we figured out that for Noser, and I’m pretty happy what we’ve done with him. And you’ll really learn a lot about him in The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation.  You’ll find out about his serious past.”

Another problem the writers had with the character of Noser involved the song lyrics he quoted.  “That was one of those things where earlier on we just found out that even when quoting the songs we had to be so careful about.  You can’t use the lyrics in the exact way that they appear in the song, but you can allude to the lyrics, and honestly, that I think for a lot of us started taking some of the fun out of it, so Javi kind of cooked that up as a really kind of ingenious and hilarious way to get around the fact that we couldn’t afford those songs but we wanted to feel as though they were present.”

Andy Reaser’s first episode, The Flying Fish Zombification, had quite a lot going on in the episode, involving the wild plot of Flying Pike turning people into trout eating zombies.  “We would have these sessions where we would go in and sort of just pitch stories to Javi in a very friendly and loving environment, and then we would see how we could sort of piece things together.  Like in my case, in Flying Fish…I think I was talking about an energy drink that would turn girls into, you know, crazy, rabid - sort of like turn them feral, I guess, and then that just sort of was an element, and then we talked about it, then it sort of became mind control for awhile, and then it became ultimately what it is.  I think one day we were in the room talking about it and Javi came in in-between meetings and just said, “Can there be a fish? Can there be some sort of very rare fish that causes this dangerous thing to happen?”  Then we kind of talked about it from there, and we thought about what sort of weird looking fish we could have, and then it became a flying fish, and then it became the fish fight, and from then on it just sort of wrote itself.”

The fish fight involves Wendy Watson (played by Natalie Morales) battling a Flying Pike while the Middleman (played by Matt Keeslar) is left unaware.  “We’re big fans of having stuff happen in the background that characters in the foreground are completely unaware of, and that really was, I think, at least so far, that was one of the bigger times we’ve done that, but we just keep on doing it.  I mean we really love that…There’s a couple jokes that Javi has come into the room and said, “It is truly impossible for us to do this joke too many times.”  Another one is to have a scene start with some doctor or a police officer or somebody saying, “We don’t get many visitors from ‘you know what ever strange place that the Middleman and Wendy are pretending to be from’.”

There were quite a few catch phrases in The Flying Fish Zombification that fans latched on to.  Probably the most popular one is “Art Crawl!” The phrase was yelled a multitude of times throughout the episode as the tenants got ready for their art show.  It has not only been yelled out at conventions but also on podcasts and such.  “I’m really happy at the popularity of Art Crawl on the few times I’ve seen it mentioned, but people seem to really embrace it, which makes me happy.”

Another one of the phrases was the infected characters shouting “Trout!”  “I believe that [‘trout’] came from my posing the question to the room one day of, “How can zombies in movies say brains, because traditionally they don’t have lips in movies, and it’s really hard to say ‘brains’ without lips?”  And then we thought of words you could say without lips, and then Jordan Rosenberg just sort of shouted out “Trout!’ and we kind of went from there. Even though of course being on ABC Family we don’t have lipless zombies.  That would be very inappropriate…We definitely enjoyed it. We enjoy screaming it to this day.  If you come to the set of the Middleman and you just kind of wait for a quiet moment and go “Trout!” then about ten or fifteen other people will go “Trout!”

Another thing that caught on from the episode was the energy drink !!!!  “The whole thing about four exclamation marks was we were sort of talking about it.  I think one day we were in the room and I told somebody that I never use one exclamation mark, I always use four, and if I ever disappear mysteriously and you find a note from me and there’s a sentence written with only one exclamation mark, then you’ll know that it’s an imposter. And then Javi kind of liked that idea.  So it was just hanging around, and then we were thinking of names for the drink, and it just sort of felt like a natural thing to do to have a drink that had four exclamation marks and was sort of an unpronounceable name, and then we had to think about how would you pronounce it, and then sort of this the look of surprise and the raised hands was the answer. And I honestly still to this day, even though it’s already been on the air, I can’t believe that I actually got to do that.”

There were two popular monologues that appeared in the episode, the first being “Hey Mr. God,” which was Reaser’s favorite part that he contributed to the episode.  “Without a doubt, my favorite thing that’s in this episode is the spoken word monologue “Hey Mr. God,” which I made up when I was spending a lot of time in coffee shops in college, and it sort of seemed like the quintessential horrible thing for people to have to endure, and when we were going to do Art Crawl and we needed things like that to be going on, I sort of did my rendition of “Hey Mr.God” for the room, and they all seemed to like it, and so we got to put it in the episode.”

The other hilarious monologue belonged to the character of Lacey Thornfield, played brilliantly by Brit Morgan.  “Lacey’s monologue was a sort of a collaboration with Javi where he came in my office and said, “Can she rip off a trench coat and have Christmas lights all over on her tights underneath?”  And I think he said something about the city, maybe he even said, “I am city.” And then as soon as he said that I just went with it the rest of the way, and Brit Morgan, she was so happy when she saw that script.  She came running up.  She was like, “I am going to get into this.  I am just going to perform the heck out of it,” and I’m actually sorry in a way that we had to even cut away from her, because she really became that piece.”

Another big part of the episode was the Sensei Ping quotes, as spoken by Wendy.  “I think my episode is the first one when you just hear people talk a lot about Sensei Ping and sort of share some of his wisdom. So, you know, in the room, when we’re breaking the story…Wendy says something about Sensei Ping, and then when you’re writing the script you actually have to kind of think of what they are, so I devised a little theory or a little plan where it just needed to sound like something that could of been spoken in the seventeenth century, and they all need to involve animals, and if you do that then you’re okay. So ‘the turtledove who grows content in its nest loses its wings at dawn,’ you know there’s nothing modern or technological about that.  ‘The badger shouldn’t bare its teeth when peace sits at the tea table’ - I think the tea table is the most modern sort of thing that you’ll ever hear from Sensei Ping, at least in one of his phrases, because the idea is that’s wisdom that’s been passed down from feudal [China].”

The second episode that was written by Reaser, The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation, also has a wacky plot, perhaps even more strange then the first.  The episode focuses on the ventriloquist vampire puppet Vladdy, who was originally the real life vampire Vlad the Impaler, and his quest for his love, Lizzy.

One of the fun aspects about the show is that the writers get to insert many references to other shows, movies, or other things from pop culture.  “Javi’s encouraged us to really think of something that we want to reference for every episode, and to put that into the episode as many times as possible, and we have all really embraced that, I have to say, although I think my next episode is really a hodgepodge, it really sort of references a whole lot of things.  I don’t know if there’s really just one theme to that.”  References for The Flying Fish Zombification include references to the episode number, one of Reaser’s favorite bands, and some horror films, to name a few.

The writers also try to insert jokes into the show in the form of chyrons – words overlayed on the screen that tell the time or location of the scene that is taking place.  Some examples from Reaser’s first episode include ‘snack time,’ ‘nap time,’ and ‘bullet time.’  “That was really fun…and then about half way through I started to get scared that there weren’t going to be enough common phrases that had time in front of them that I could use, but I made the list, and then they all kind of worked out, and I tried to have them sort of roughly correspond to what was happening in the script, and that’s sort of what we did. But it was very fun, I had really high hopes for my second episode, and it was going to be this whole other thing and then we were just on such a production time crunch that I had to kind of cool it on the goofiness, at least as far as the specific time of day itself.

At present, the future of The Middleman is unknown, but the fan base keeps growing and fans keep hoping for a second season. The last two episodes of the season will begin airing on Monday night. You can watch Andy Reaser’s episodes by streaming them on from ABC Family’s The Middleman website, or you can download them from iTunes.  The full first season of the show will be available soon on DVD.