The Middleman recently finished its first season on ABC Family.  This show combines science fiction and comedy to make a very unique experience.  Margaret Dunlap, the assistant writer for the show, penned the next to the last episode of the season, entitled, The Clotharian Contamination Protocol.

Dunlap’s episode, the eleventh of the season [112], deals with nanobots from outer space sent by the alien race the Clotharians, released after Voyager 2 comes back to earth.  They infect Ida, (played by Mary Pat Gleeson) causing a lockdown at Middleman Headquarters, and cause her to think that the Middleman (played by Matt Keeslar) and Wendy (played by Natalie Morales) are against her.  The episode also features the introduction of the comic book character Manservant Neville, played by Mark Sheppard.

Dunlap’s plan did not originally involve writing for television.  She fell into it by accident. “I was off at college my freshman year and I wound up with an odd hole in my schedule that I hadn’t anticipated having, and my roommate was taking a playwriting course, and to take it as a freshman you had to get permission from the instructor. And I stood there going, ‘Well if she can take it, I can take it.’  And I did, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is kind of neat.’ And I think we were reading Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey and I’m looking at that and I’m like, ‘Oh wow there is a method to this madness.’  It was sort of eye-opening for me.  So I did a screenwriting course the following semester, and then there was actually a Screenplay 2 course at my smaller college, and after that I was out of screenwriting and playwriting courses, so I did an independent study in the second half of my sophomore year, and that’s my first feature screenplay.  I just sort of kept going from there.”

It was the creator of The Middleman, Javi Grillo-Marxuach, and Dunlap’s love of science fiction that brought her to the show.  “I got to work on Middleman because when I graduated from the MSA program at UFC they have an arrangement where you can request an industry mentor, and Javi was at the top of my wish list, and he said yes, and we hit it off.  And so I’d known him for about four years or so at the time The Middleman got picked up, and so when that went ahead he was in a position to give me a break and brought me on as the writer’s assistant…I’m absolutely a fan of sci-fi, and the reason why I had requested him at the top of my industry mentor wish list was he’d come in to give a presentation, in an entertainment industry seminar course that I was in.  He got up and he was talking about previous pilots he’d done earlier in his career, and how they’ve gone, and working on Seaquest, and stuff like that, and I thought to myself, ‘Well when somebody is your industry mentor they agree to meet you in person once, and it’s like, even if it never goes anywhere professionally, we could spend an hour talking about ‘What is your favorite season of Star Trek Deep Space Nine?’ and it wouldn’t be a wasted afternoon.  And sort of the idea that we would do that and neither one of us would consider it a waste of an afternoon, was sort of there, and we did not actually discuss that when we first met, but it very much was sort of chatting about shows we both liked, and because he knew people who had worked on Star Trek obviously, but we both sort of watched those, and books we’d read, and stuff like that.  And so at the end of the lunch he’s like, “Do you have any specs?” and I’m like, “Yeah,” and so he’s like “Send them to me,” and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

It took a while for Dunlap to get over her shock at seeing her work on the screen.  “It’s finally getting past the point for me of complete surreality.  The first couple times it’s like, ‘Is this actual TV that actual people are actually watching?’  And I remember when I was just starting on the outline or starting in on the script, Andy Reaser was walking through, and he looks over at me and he says, “I don’t think it’s quite dawned on you that you’re writing an episode of television.”  And I’m like, “I think it’s ignorance of that fact that’s the only thing that’s allowing me to keep it together right now.”  So it’s like ‘I don’t have time to panic, I have to get a script done!’”

The best part about working on the show for Dunlap is the people.  “From everybody in the writer’s room, to the folks in the production office, to everybody on set, it’s just a great group of people.  Everyone really came in and gave a hundred plus percent to get this show made on the time and budget that we had.  And everybody really enjoyed working together.  It’s the sort of thing where the teamsters are like, “You know, it’s a real shame, this was a good show.”  These are the guys that can just as easily show up and take care of their job and go home, or go to another show on a broadcast network that might pay them better, but it really was a great family.  I remember being at the season wrap party, and it’s packed full of people at this restaurant.  I’m just looking around and I’m like, ‘I’ve never been in a group of this many people where I wanted to talk to so many of them.’  It’s like 150 people; I will have to say ‘hi’ to everybody in the room…It’s one of the nice things about having our stages right by the production offices, you’re running into everybody in the course of the day.  You’d eat with people and you’d see them, and I got in the habit in the second half of the season, after I had sort of wrapped up the writer’s room for the night and printed up my notes and everything was ready for the next day, I’d sort of take my bag on my way out and just spend half an hour to an hour hanging around on set, getting to know people there, watching how things were done, and shadowing whoever the writer on set was at the time.  And that was a really great experience, especially for this being effectively my first job.”

Before writing her own episode for the show, Dunlap was the assistant writer.  “I think for awhile I had the description of my job as a writer’s assistant.  I’m like, ‘Well mostly I assist writers,’ and that sort of sums it up.  It was a lot of time in the [writer’s] room, keeping notes organized.  Another thing that I got to do as the assistant, is whenever we had a pitch call or a notes call from the network, I would be there taking notes on everything that they said so we’d have a record of their notes on the story, and that was really a great experience, that by the time I was sitting in on those calls, because it was about the scripts I had written, I was sort of used to it by that time.  And for a writer, it’s not entirely dissimilar, you’re either in the room breaking a story that you’re going to write, or that somebody else is going to be writing, or if your episode is in production, then you’re down on the set as much as possible in between going back to the room or going to preproduction meetings if you’re shuttling a script through that, or afterwards, you go and you meet with the post [post-production] and you sit with the editors and you go to sound mix and those sorts of things…It’s keeping tabs on the stories as they move through the machines.”

Dunlap remembers having a harder time at the beginning.  “I remember being very nervous my first couple of weeks on the job, just because it’s such a new thing, new people, and you don’t want to screw it up, and coming from working day jobs or office things, and just being like, ‘This can’t be all of my job.’  I kept waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “There’s all this other stuff that you’re supposed to be doing that you’re not,” but no, my job was to sit there and take notes…It was a fabulous learning experience.  I think Javi after however many years he’s been on various staffs, he wanted to make this the good staffing experience that he would want to have working off the guy running the show. So it was a group where he and Hans [Beimler], and also Sarah [Watson], were very much more junior writers.  It’s like everybody learns how to produce their own episode, everybody goes to the preproduction meetings, myself included.  Doing your own production rewrites and that sort of stuff, and so it was really a hugely valuable experience.”

Some of Dunlap’s schedule changed when working on her own episode.  “Well for so long, the defining characteristic of my job as writer’s assistant was, if there’s something going on in the room I am there, and I am taking notes.  And then Mason [LeCompte] or somebody else would sub in for me as we were breaking during this episode, 112, because I was sent off to be working on my outline, and then on my script.  They gave me an office that wasn’t being used, and there was this blank white room and desk, and me, with my computer, and I didn’t quite want to move into the office, because I didn’t know if I’d get to hang onto it.  So I was just sort of there in this bare white room in a chair, writing on my script, and I’d periodically poke my head out and a coordinator or Mason would be like, “How are you doing?”  And I’m like, “I feel a little bit like I’ve been sent to time out.”  I could hear the writer’s room was going on, but I’m not there, and it felt very wrong to me.  But it’s absolutely fabulous, and I’m so proud of the way the episode turned out.”

It was because of Grillo-Marxuach that Dunlap got to writer her own episode.  “Because I was the writer’s assistant, the chief part of that job is being in the writer’s room while stories are breaking and taking notes on everything that happens, so it’s sort of like being there from, I think the writers were there for about three days before I came on board, but from effectively the beginning, talking about when people start pitching out early ideas.  My first pitch that I remember was when Javi sort of invited me to throw something out one Monday morning.  It was an alien inspector comes to earth, so I think, you know you can see very obviously how that became nanobots take over Ida and make her turn evil.”

From there the story became the episode that aired on television.  “It’s an interesting progression actually because that was sort of the idea.  We were like, ‘Yeah there was something interesting in that,’ and Javi had already talked to the network about doing an evil or a malfunctioning Ida story. It was like, you know, it feels like those two might fit together somehow, and for a long time we all sort of assumed that there would be Ida and then another separate evil version of Ida, like she had a sister, or somebody that she had been in an alien battledroid with, or her makers made other Idas that they had sent to earth and it turns out that ours is one of the kind fuzzy ones.  Then it was a few days before we started, we were just coming to the end of figuring out The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation [episode 110, written by Andy Reaser] story, and so we were going to really start breaking this one in earnest, and I remember I went into Hans Beimler’s office and I said, “I’ve been thinking about something.  I wanted to know what you thought of it.” And he’s like “What is it?” and I said, “I’m wondering, what if something happens to Ida, and she comes back from O2STK, and she comes back wrong, and she is convinced that we have turned against her and she has to kill us,” and he’s like “I like that.  Don’t pitch it to Javi, we’ll wait until tomorrow,” and then Javi comes in twenty minutes later and he’s like, “Pitch your idea to Javi!”…And we pitch it to him and he’s like “Yeah…that’s good.” So I think originally we conceived we’d kill off Ida like five times in the first act and then eventually we just killed off Interrodroid as many times as humanly possible.  I was glad to get some robot carnage in there.”

One part of the episode Dunlap especially enjoyed was the scene in Ida’s brain.  “That was so much fun to do it was sort of like, ‘I wonder, what is Ida’s brain like?  Well it turns out she’s a lot nicer than she is half the time.’  It was great fun to write and I think it was fun to give Mary Pat something a little different to do, because she’s such a sweet person, and now she’s to do something aside from accusing Wendy of being a marijuana user, although even Brain Ida manages to throw in a pot reference there.

Dunlap enjoyed writing for all of the characters for different reasons.  “You know it sounds like a bit of a cop out, but everybody is sort of fun to write for different reasons, and often times part of the fun of I think writing Ida or the denizens back at the loft, is that you know as great as it is writing for Wendy and the Middleman, they have to often carry a lot of plot and a lot of explaining in their lines, so you get to write a lot of them, and they get to do a lot of fun stuff with the Middleman exclamations and sort of the delightful snarkiness of Wendy, but you also sort of have to carry a lot of plot load in those, and so when Ida says something for the most part, it can just be a lot of fun and you never quite know what’s going to come out of her mouth this way - like who else is going to come up with ‘hippy lettuce?’”

Dunlap’s favorite scenes involve the messages that Wendy records for the Middleman during the episode.  “It’s funny because we actually got to film this favorite scene twice, but it was the “Code 47” that Wendy records for the Middleman.  And I just remember, we recorded the ops half of it first, and then a couple days later we did Wendy’s part of it, in Ida’s brain, but I remember being there towards the end of the day on Friday and Natalie is just sort of sitting in her street clothes off camera and reading lines for Matt, going through it, you’re watching it and his reaction and the tears welling up...And I think it was right around that time that we found out that we were doing twelve episodes instead of thirteen, and so there was sort of a little bit of wistfulness surrounding that too.  So I hadn’t intended Wendy to be a mouthpiece for me, certainly there was that feeling of, ‘I’m so proud to be on the show, I’m proud to know everybody that I’m working with.’”

Dunlap also enjoyed the messages that the Middleman recorded for Wendy.  “Those were a blast to write. I had written like a little bit on all of them, and I remember Matt came back and he said, “I’m picturing that this is just the beginning, of like 20 minutes of stuff he has for her.”  And I’m like, “Absolutely.”  It’s not going to be brief so I remember when we filmed it, he did it, and he would just continue on a little bit longer, so you could see that there was the intent when he goes off that he was going to say something else.”

There were also certain lines that Dunlap enjoyed.  “There’re some lighter bits, I always enjoy the “It’s thinking like that that led to drug resistant malaria” line.  I think that was one of the first jokes where the director sort of looked over at me and said, “That’s a funny bit.”  And I’m like, “Yeah, somebody else likes that joke.”  Things like that.  I remember there was, I think it was the line where the Middleman tells Wendy, you know, offers to let her help with the probe and says, “It’s your chance to handle a piece of history, albeit through triple strength prophylactics.”  And we were in first rehearsal and I heard somebody over in the camera department smothering a laugh, and I was like, ‘Yeah!’  You get no courtesy laughs from the camera department, so he really must have really thought that was funny.”

Another thing Dunlap enjoyed was getting to work with the guest actor Mark Sheppard.  “It was great fun to get to introduce Manservant Neville to the TV universe, because he of course appears in the comics, but to bring in Mark A. Sheppard in as a big guest star in it.  I was like, ‘This is cool, you know, I watched Battlestar Galactica, that’s nifty.’…And he’s sort of around in a lot of everything.

Fortunately there was not a lot that had to be cut from Dunlap’s episode.  “Fortunately this was an episode where even from early cuts we were very close to time, so we didn’t have to make a lot of you know, we didn’t have to cut a lot down to fit that into our time, but we had to make production cuts for whatever reason – we didn’t have time for something, or we had to change something logistically, and I think for the most part there I didn’t have any huge regrets from anything we left out.  There was initially a final scene.  The last scene of the episode was Wendy out on the balcony, at the loft, looking up at the sky and the stars at night, and playing with her dad’s lighter, and it was sort of, you know, that moments of it tie back to the whole Voyager thing, the beginning…It’s a little sad that we don’t get that, and we just we didn’t have time, we knew that we weren’t going to have time to settle that so it got cut out of the script at its very early, early stage.  And it’s like, ‘Oh that was nice,’ but you know, I watch the episode now, and I don’t miss it.”

Originally the season was slated to be thirteen episodes but was cut down to twelve; however, that gave them extra time to work on the season finale.  The future of the show is unknown at this time; however, Dunlap knows that the plans will get out somehow.  “There’s a lot of fun stuff and we sort of plotted out what we were going to do in episode thirteen, and hopefully we’ll get to do that either in season two, or you know if it winds up being all there will be of Middleman, you know Javi, I think he has ideas for ways to either as a graphic novel or something to get any of that sort of stuff out that remains out there.”

For now, you can watch The Middleman ABC Family or download them on iTunes.  The first full season of the show will be available soon on DVD.