The Middleman: Q & A with Javier Grillo-Marxuach

This summer, The Middleman, a live-action adaptation of Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s comic series of the same name hit ABC Family.  The Middleman follows Wendy, an art school graduate who is recruited to fight the forces of evil with a milk chugging, square-jawed hero.  Pink Raygun was recently invited to participate in a conference call with executive producer Grillo-Marxuach.

The moderated conference call ran for about an hour and in that time, Pink Raygun was able to get in two questions (however, Grillo-Marxuach’s answers took roughly seven pages of the forty-one page conference call transcript). His responses were so good and so thorough that we thought they deserved to be featured as is.  We’ll feature the remaining topics of discussion in a separate post tomorrow.  

PRG: This was initially conceived for television before you took it down the comics road.  So what has changed?  Why is now the right time to bring The Middleman to the television landscape?

J. Grillo-Marxuach: 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.

The other thing is that I don’t think that there are still shows out there that are similar to this.  Obviously you’ve got Smallville and you’ve got Dr. Who on the SciFi Channel and things like that.  But I think that where this show and sort of the sensibility of ABC Family have dovetailed very well is I think ABC Family is trying very hard to create themselves as a network that has smart, very individual shows that represent a certain point of view.  And I think there was a very good confluence of this show and that point of view.  

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 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. I think that, in addition to all those things, ABC Family was also just the people who were willing to take a chance on the show and say, “We understand that you have a very individual perception of what this show needs to be, and we’ll go with it.”  I couldn’t believe that, even after the comic book – and the comic book had a fair amount of attention – I’m being allowed to do the things I’m doing on the show.  And I remember doing the pilot I would call the executives at ABC Family and say, “Guys, there is an ape in the show,” and they’d be like, ‘Yes, we know,” and I’m like, “It’s not a metaphorical ape; it’s an actual ape with a machine gun and in a tracksuit, who runs a mafia,” and they’re like, “Yes, we know.”

So I think it’s really that perfect storm of a network looking to define itself by having shows that are specific and shows that are quirky and shows that are kind of brand defining.  I think it was finally being in a place in my career where I could really say, “This is the show.  This is how I would run it.  This is how we would do this.”  And then it’s sort of the stars aligning in the right place.

But I’ll tell you a story.  I was working on Medium when we sold the pilot and my agents, I had prevailed on my agents to send this out, that it’s really what I wanted to do and it was the right time.  There were a couple of networks who had looked at it – and ABC Family had expressed a strong interest and we were sort of in that last moment before making the deal.  And I walked out of the writer’s offices for Medium and I looked up in the sky and a plane was writing the words “Kyle XY” above me.  I thought, “You know what; it’s fate.”  And that’s kind of what closed it.

PRG: Okay, so you’ve said it’s light-hearted, it’s optimistic, and with a tentacled butt monster, mafia ape….

J. Grillo-Marxuach: You know, ABC Family standards and practices will kill me for calling it that, because it was in the comic book, and in the TV show we kind of tweaked that a little bit to better – what’s the word I’m looking for – to better exemplify the family in ABC Family.  So it’s more like a multi-limbed fleshy beast.

PRG: OK.  It’s obviously got a very fun kind of atmosphere to it.  But, how are you keeping The Middleman in that realm of lighthearted fun without it falling into something that’s more akin to groan-worthy camp?  Because it’s a very fine line to walk, I think.

J. Grillo-Marxuach:  It is.  Here’s the thing, 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.

There’s a show that I worked on called The Chronicle that I did actually like the year after I wrote The Middleman pilot.  And that was a show that was created by Silvio Horta, who is the creator of Ugly Betty on ABC now, and just a fantastically big-hearted guy.  And one of the things that has informed the writing of The Middleman from that show and from Silvio’s just own worldview, is that 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.  

I don’t think it’s that different from something that’s very hardcore horror or something. Every show, for example the X-Files, which is a show that went as far into horror and darkness as we’re going into lightheartedness and absurdity, what kept you grounded there was that Mulder and Scully were believable characters who followed a consistent theme of internal logic in their own character through the material, right?  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.

It’s when the show starts winking at itself and becoming very self-referential and the thing that The Middleman isn’t.  As I said, it’s Robert Stack, it’s the way Adam West played Batman, you know; that’s not what we’re doing here, and I think that if we ever sort of go into that the show will die as a result of it.  And the instruction that I’ve given everybody involved with the show is that it needs to all be played straight.  And it’s not just the acting; it’s the writing, it’s the production design, it’s everything.  The moment it becomes cartoony or just too self-referential, the show dies.  We need to design, direct, act, write the show like people are actually living through these things and let the audience come to it through the characters.  And I think – I hope that’s what’s keeping us from becoming – did you say “horrific camp”?  “hideous camp”?

PRG: Groan-worthy camp. You can pretty much put any adjective you want to in front of that.

J. Grillo-Marxuach: Look, let me tell you something, I mean Wendy is going to fight a flying zombie fish in one of these episodes, you know.  Will it work?  We like to think it will.  There will be vampire ventriloquist dummies in this show, you know.  Will it work?  We sure hope so.  You know, we’ve got 100 Mexican wrestlers, we’ve got succubus fashion models, we have aliens who look like plastic surgery victims – so you can send me an email in six episodes and let me know if it’s groan-worthy camp.  I will defer to your judgment on that.

The Middleman starring Natalie Morales and Matt Keeslar premieres on June 16th on ABC Family.  Check back with Pink Raygun tomorrow for more on The Middleman! 

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