What I do want to know is how are you going to structure the show?

In my wildest dreams, this becomes like the American Dr. Who and it runs for 40 years and there’s a new Middleman and all that stuff. But honestly, I have a spectacular cast here. Matt Keeslar is worth his weight in gold, and so is Natalie, and Mary Pat and Brett and Jake. So there’s really no reason to sort of look at this as having an endpoint for me.

It’s interesting, after working on Lost for so long and it being so plan-centric, “What are we going to do? When are we going to reveal this? Let’s put it up on the whiteboard,” and all that. When I went to work for Glenn Gordon Caron, his attitude was kind of the exact opposite; his attitude was, “Let’s be improvisational. Let’s see what grows out of the show and work it.” So my attitude with The Middleman in terms of what happens is really about that. I have a ton of stories that I know I want to tell with these characters, my staff has a ton of great stories that they’ve pitched that they want to do. So now we’ve got all that and we just sort of develop the characters organically out of it.

On Lost, we were so – not constrained by the mythology – but we were so bound to it and we were servicing it at all times and we did always say, “We know where we’re going,” and we made sort of designs and plans for all that. One of the things I really liked about how Ron Moore approached Galactica is that he’s very out about saying, “No, we’re making this up and you have to trust us.”

I think with The Middleman, especially because the show isn’t serialized and it doesn’t have like a far-ranging mythology, I’m very comfortable saying, “We have these characters. You have to trust us that we love the characters – hopefully you love them too – and that we will sort of allow them to evolve in this world that we’ve created.” That’s really the plan. I know how the season ends, obviously, and I have an idea of what sort of some of the heartrending decisions that he’ll have to make and all that.

But again, because the show is a growing and evolving thing, we’re kind of going to hang on for the ride and see where it takes us. I think that you, as an audience, will have to trust us that we have your best interests and that of the show at heart and that we will service what needs to be serviced and make a good show every week.

And, by the way, the third episode that will air is basically the second comic book, with the Mexican wrestlers, with the Middlejet, with the pyramid, with Sensei Ping. I mean, it’s all there.

How many episodes are slated to air for season one?

We’re shooting the 6 out of 13 episodes right now, and then the gods of the ratings will decide whether there are more than that. But that is how many we have scheduled for air, and we’re going to air through the summer.

And then with ABC Family and other cable networks, they sort of schedule a block of episodes at a time and then they come back and so forth. I think we’ll be coming on just as Greek is finishing its run and then they’ll put on the next show and all that. So really once the summer is done I guess, or as we’re sort of some relevant bit into our run, they will decide if we appeased the ratings deity well enough and I guess they’ll decide what our future is.

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

You know, ABC Family standards and practices will kill me for saying it’s a butt monster, 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.

And 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.

Yes. No, 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”?

Groan-worthy camp.

Groan-worthy camp.

You can pretty much put any adjective you want to in front of that.

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.

Don’t forget! Check out The Middleman, Monday, June 16th @ 8/7c on ABC Family.

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