Interview: Javier Grillo-Marxuach

By Lisa Fary

The Middleman did what sci-fi and other genre programming haven’t done in a long time: it made me smile.  And not that grimacing kind of smile that flickers when your well meaning (but clueless) friend says “Star Track” or when you learn that the Sci Fi Channel is dropping “Sci Fi” from their name.  My Middlesmile is a genuine, feel good smile. And with trout craving zombies, vampire puppets, and an alternate universe where everyone has a goatee, The Middleman gave me a lot to smile about.

After the season finale, I spoke with The Middleman‘s creator, Javier Grillo-Marxuach about the show.

LF: I want to do my part to make sure The Middleman comes back for a second season.

JGM: In our tracking of the websites, we read Pink Raygun’s recaps weekly, so we are very much aware of your ongoing support of the show and very much appreciate it. I know Andy and Jordan would get into things like, “You know, Pink Raygun liked my episode better than yours.” And Andy would be like, “Why doesn’t Pink Raygun love me?”

LF: When John and I were packing the truck the night before our cross country move it happened to be a Monday.  The very last thing we unhooked and loaded up was the TV because we had to catch The Middleman. After that, we were ready to move.

JGM: That’s great!

LF: Looking back on the twelve episodes you did for ABC Family, which episode do you think was the most successful?

JGM: That’s a really fraught question because you can’t really pick a favorite without sort of demeaning all the other ones.  I’ll always say that they’re all my favorite. But, I think of our last episode because we had an extra day to shoot it and we had some extra money to make some things happen that we couldn’t on an episodic basis.  It’s a really good example of the show at it’s best. Also because it was sort of the cumulative end of nine months of everyone working together to get the show done, so everyone was at the top of their game.  A lot of elements came together and we got some enhanced production for it as well.

Another episode I really love is an episode that wasn’t nearly as ambitious in terms of scope of production – I love the episode we did with Kevin Sorbo, “The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown”. That was an episode where, if you look at the show, almost all of it was shot on stage. We built two additional standing sets and went on location for less than a day.  But the episode still looks great, it’s a fun episode.  We had such a fun script to work from.  Those are two good examples of the show, one with enhanced production really firing on all cylinders and the other with our standard production just to show where we worked really well with the characters.

LF: Is there anything you would have done differently?

JGM: Honestly, at the risk of sounding really really arrogant, no. I have no regrets about how we went about making the show. The things that were in my control – that was the writing staff and the creative – we really put our best foot forward and we stand behind the show very proudly. Would it have been great to have three million dollars to make the show? Well, yeah! (laughs) But, I think ultimately the thing we found out was it’s really time that’s your worst enemy, not so much budget. From the beginning we knew that the show would be budgeted modestly and one of our philosophies was “pokey but endearing”.  We weren’t going to be able to afford the James Bond action, but we found ways of making what we could do fun and funny and make it work dramatically.  When I look at the show, I don’t see compromise.  I see resourcefulness and I’m very proud of it.

LF: By the end of the series, Matt Keeslar was blowing me away on a weekly basis.  But, I’ve got to admit, at the very beginning, in the pilot, I felt that he was the weakest point in the show.

JGM: Really?

LF: Yeah.  But after the pilot, he really punched it up and did an amazing job.

JGM: Matt is a very methodical actor. He’s highly trained, a Juliard graduate and has a lot of experience.  His work is extremely detail oriented. I think that with a character like the Middleman, that’s something that really unfolded for a lot of people over the course of the season.  I think he was always working it – I saw him doing it, but I think it was very easy to write off the character early on as an impersonation of Robert Stack. It took a while for a lot of people to notice what Matt was doing, which was imbuing him with a sense of humanity and really making the cartooniness of the character the result of choices that the personality made.  I wanted to give Matt an episode about how the Middleman got to be that way. A lot of that was in our thirteenth episode.  When he read the outline – because we did have an outline and we started writing that script before we made other decisions about production – it was one of those things where you could see in his reaction to it was that a lot of his work was really coming to fruit.

To go back to your previous question, if there was one regret that I have, it’s that we didn’t get to make that thirteenth episode because it would have put a lot of Matt’s work on the character in context as well.

LF: You’ve said several times that he was always who you had in mind for this role. But, he’s not well known.  Did you have doubters when it came to casting him?

JGM: You know, Matt came in and auditioned and earned that part. For me, he didn’t have to.  Certainly, the network always wants to see what they’re investing their money in and he was great about that and knocked it out of the park like he always does.  I don’t know that there were doubters, I think they just needed to see him. But for me, no doubts. I knew.

LF: He was so good, and so was Natalie Morales. I hope she goes really far in her career because she’s amazing.

JGM: I think she will because she’s spectacularly talented. She is someone who came in through the door during the audition process, with very few credits behind her and tackled a very demanding role: she had to be the audience’s point of view into the weird world of The Middleman and sell that reality. Natalie has such a tremendous amount of native talent that it’s kind of scary, really…and incidentally, she’s also a heck of a nice person, which also helps quite a bit.

LF: This was your first time being a showrunner. How did that go for you?

JGM: I’ve been working professionally in TV for twelve years now and have worked for a lot of showrunners, people ranging from JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Cartlon Cuse to Glen Gordon Caron to Graham Yost and David Greenwalt. I worked with a lot of people and that gave me an opportunity to look at a lot of different styles. So, I felt like I came in pretty well prepared just by virtue of the amount of work that I’ve done. I’m one of those guys who had a slow and steady climb – I’m not one of those guys who got a show on the air in my second gig.  So I had a lot of time to think about what I would do and how I would do it and all that. When it came time to actually do it, it really was just about whether some of the philosophies I developed would work.

We were able to marshal a crew to work on a really tight schedule and with a really tight budget and deliver a show that looks really great. A lot of people mentioned the budget in their reviews of the show, but I think in spite of that, the show has a great look and everything we aimed to do with the show was fulfilled. The writing staff came together so quickly and was able to put together a show that evolved in a way that the characters deepened and got warmer and richer.  I think it worked out well.

The biggest challenge as a showrunner was that myself and John Ziffren who was the other executive producer on the show,  and Jon Pare, who was the line producer, really had to manage the show pretty ruthlessly in terms of the budget and what we could and couldn’t do. The lesson I learned was that you only have to have what you see on the screen.  When you do a show on our budget, if you move the camera over an inch you’d probably see a guy holding up the set! (laughs). But we learned to produce the show with just what we needed to make it look as great as it possibly could. I learned some lessons about that, too.  When you’re not working with a show like Lost, which is a tremendously budgeted show, you learn to work very efficiently and very quickly.

LF: You’ve done Boomtown and Law and Order, but you’ve done a lot in this kind of genre television.

JGM: I’m a genre guy, totally.

LF: When you set out to write for television, was writing genre your goal?

JGM: It was, but when I started, which was a long ago time called the mid-nineties, sci-fi was still a ghetto in television. There were a lot of writers who did well on Star Trek, but a lot of them had a hard time breaking out of that perception that they were “sci-fi guys”. I had been a network executive for two years after finishing the screenwriting program at the University of Southern California and I saw a lot of the people who were brought in to do sci-fi shows on the networks would deliberately not use established sci-fi writers. They would go to people who had quote-unquote classier credits, people who had written for ER and things like that. Invariably, the fans would watch those shows and be upset that they were just repeating things that other sci-fi shows had done for a long time.

Even though I always wanted to write sci-fi, my representation was always pushing me toward getting that toney crack at an NYPD Blue or Law and Order credit. That’s why in my early career you see me going toward something like Law and Order or Boomtown.  What’s happened is because of people like Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams and the general mainstream invasion of sci-fi, it’s now very respectable to work in sci-fi. And in that circuitous route, I’ve gone back to my niche.

LF: You said the mid-nineties was kind of a sci-fi ghetto, which I think is really accurate. I remember skulking into a sci-fi convention around 1995 hoping that no one saw me.  In talking with other people since then, I realize that that was fairly common.  But, lately it’s become socially acceptable to not only write sci-fi, but to enjoy sci-fi as a fan.  What do you think drove that change?

JGM: The Star Wars generation came of age and started making shows and writing novels. Honestly, I think that Star Wars was a massive watershed in terms of people’s acceptance of science fiction as a cultural force. I’m 38, I was 7 when I saw Star Wars and at that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.  There are a lot of guys out there who have the exact same origin story as I do. Furthermore, you look at guys like me, we grew up on Star Wars, we grew up on Watchmen, we grew up on Dark Knight.  And hey, guess what the biggest franchises are right now? Dark Knight, Star Wars and Watchmen! (laughs).  The generation that grew up reading the watershed artistic comic books that had high minded concerns and grew up watching Star Wars has come around to put those high minded concerns into more genre stuff.

The other thing that you can’t discount is the internet. When I was a kid, I would ride my bike to the drugstore and buy a copy of Starlog, read it cover to cover a million times, and that was my exposure to sci-fi. I could go to the used book store and buy sci-fi books and stuff like that, but the amount of contact I could have with like-minded people was very limited.  The internet has blown that so wide open.  If you have a livejournal, you could be talking to 500 or 600 people who have a similar interest. That has the effect of making you feel like you’re not in a closet.  It’s those two things and they intersect quite a bit.

LF: What advice would you give to a young person who wants a career writing in television?

JGM: You have to produce continually. There’s a lot to getting a career in television – getting an agent, moving to LA and stuff. But, it really begins with you having a solid grasp of the craft of writing television. You know, you can read books about it and do all sorts of things to educate yourself, but at the end of the day it just comes down to produce, produce, produce. Write more, when you finish one, start another one and then start another. The only way you can master a craft is by doing that craft. If you don’t have a tremendous amount of spec television scripts, you can’t say that you’re someone who has really tried to work at it. When you land in a television staff, the first thing they’re going to ask you to do is break a story and write a script. That’s the real crucible, you know.  Take care of the work and the work will take care of you. It’s the only advice I have.

Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS

Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

Related Stuff: