The Middleman is a brand-new series premiering June 16th at 8/7c on ABC Family. And I’m going to tell you right now, several of you going to fall head over heels in love with this one. Of course, some of you are probably going to run screaming in the other direction but that’s ok, it can’t be everyone’s cup o’ tea.

As it so happens, I have a little history with this show. You see, I’ve been reading Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s (the creator and showrunner) blog for… well, a long time, because he was still writing on Lost when I started reading it. Back in September he announced that ABC Family had optioned The Middleman, a comic he had created (that he actually created as a pilot before he made it a comic). Not long after, he opened up The Middleblog and it’s been awesome to follow along with the whole process. Watching the cast and crew have fun with their new toys (aka the set and props) was enough to get me to watch even if I wasn’t interested int he premise as well.

So, what is the premise you ask? Well…

Wendy Watson, a 22 year-old art school graduate struggling to stay afloat at a series of dead-end temp jobs, bounces from one temp job to another while putting off her mother’s daily inquiries to what she is going to do with her life when, during a routine temp assignment at a local laboratory, she is thrown into the middle of a science experiment gone very wrong. If that weren’t bizarre enough, who should show up to save the day, but a mysterious, handsome, gun-wielding stranger who introduces himself only as… The Middleman. And this covert hero, who neutralizes any and all danger humanity isn’t prepared to face, is in need of a new colleague in the fight against otherworldly evil and thinks Wendy fits the bill. After a series of tests that would make grown astronauts weep and Navy Seals beg for mercy, Wendy is quickly recruited into the Middleman ranks. Now living a double life, can Wendy balance an undercover Middleman mission with “normal” life in her offbeat circle of artist friends?

Come on, does that or does that not sound awesome?

About a week or so ago, I got the chance to take part in a conference call with Javier and, yes, I totally geeked out over it. What can I say… it’s fun (and sometimes nausea inducing) to interview the stars of shows but it’s a real treat when I get to talk with (1) someone I’ve got a fannish history with and (2) one of the creative types behind the scenes. So to get both those rolled into one? SWEET!

Clearly I wasn’t the only one excited to talk to Javier since a dozen others got ahead of me in the question queue. Then Javier, who by the way talks very much like how he blogs (and by that I mean, verbosely), would get asked one question but answer ten. Not that that’s a bad thing. He’s so hilarious and engaging that you can’t help but be drawn in by everything he has to say. (To give you an idea, here’s what he asked when our host said she’d give us a warning when we were on the last question, “So, will there be like a gladiatorial blood sport to determine who gets to ask the final question? … Excellent. I like it that way.”) It does, however, make it a bit hard to actually sound intelligent when you get a turn to ask a question! Still, it was a fascinating call and I’m happy to be able to share it with you but I will warn you that it’s a bit long.

Here’s a few of the things Javier had to say…

Can you explain what the Javi-centric worldview is?

I believe it was something that was written by somebody who wrote on my Wikipedia entry.

No, you know what, honestly, it reads a little more arrogant than I probably originally intended it to sound. 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.

If you asked what the Javi-centric worldview is, it’s pretty much about that. I think, tonally, 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.

How does it feel to finally be creating your own ideas up there with your own characters?

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 Middleman is based on a Viper comic series you created, can you tell us about some of the adjustments with characters and storylines you had to make to bring it to life?

What’s interesting is that the Viper comic book series is based on a pilot that I wrote in ’98 or ’99. Really, the comic book followed the idea to make it a TV series. So if you’ve read the comic book and you look at the pilot, you’ll notice that the pilot is tremendously true to the comic book and the comic book was written from the pilot script that I wrote originally. There’s not a lot of difference.

I mean, there are a couple of things we did. Like, for example, when I wrote the pilot back in ’98 and ’99 it was 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.

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.

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