The Last Episode of "The Middle"

Okay, it's been a week since the one-hour series finale of "The Middle" aired, so I'm going to go right ahead and spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't seen it yet . . . because if you haven't seen it by now, you're not going to.

Axl did in fact move to Denver for a new job, and the Heck family drove him there from their hometown of Orson, Indiana . . . but before they could even reach the Mississippi River, Sean Donahue - originally on his way to Africa for the summer as a medical volunteer - dropped everything and caught up with them once he found Sue's snow globe present and realized she was in love with him as much as he was in love with her.  The moment of Sue and Sean coming together that no one saw coming or imagine would happen did, in fact come . . . and it happened. :-)   On a rural highway in the middle of nowhere.

Too bad the snow globe broke. 

But the bigger surprise was that Frankie's voice-overs from throughout the series had taken place looking back from some time around 2030 or so, because we learn what happened to the Heck children after - long after - 2018.  Sue and Sean married after two breakups, Brick became a bestselling children's author, and Axl eventually returned to Orson and had three sons that were more like miniature Axls than the three Douglas brothers.  And Mike and Frankie - well, their lives pretty much stayed the same. They never got any of their appliances fixed.  But the Heck family - for all of their dysfunction - stayed together in spirit as much as in the flesh, and when all was said and done, they still love each other.

Except that they have a funny way of showing it. :-D

This was easily the best series finale in a quarter century.  You have to go back to the last episode of "Cheers" to find something as classy and as satisfying.  And Frances Heck is the luckiest mom on earth. :-)       

The Finale of "The Middle"

Tomorrow, after nine seasons, ABC's "The Middle" - the only sitcom I watch any more - comes to an end.  "The Middle," of course, concerns an Indiana family who can't win for losing and try to muddle through with hilarious consequences.  The series finale will pick up with Axl preparing to move to Denver for a new job and Frankie (his mom) in a tizzy over it, while Sue prepares to spend a summer without her would-be boyfriend Sean.  Or will she?

I still find it hard to believe this show is ending, but unless you're talking about hip-hop, all things must come to an end.  Among the things I'm going to miss about "The Middle" are Brick's quirky obsession with books and with mundane things like print fonts and lawn chairs, as well as dad Mike's deadpan stoicism.  I'll also miss laughing over the quilt stored in the oven and the bedroom wall made of poster board.  But the thing I'm probably going to miss the most is Sue - sweet, perky, Heck daughter Sue, with her over-caffeinated optimism.  As played by Eden Sher, Sue resembled Janet Evans with a hormone imbalance!

And after everything I've written here about Janet Evans, you know I mean that as a compliment. :-)

Back later with some comments about the last episode.

The End Of "The Middle"

"The Middle," that underappreciated (when compared to "Modern Family") ABC sitcom starring Patricia Heaton about an utterly hapless and disaster-prone blue-collar Midwestern family, will begin its ninth season next month (October 3 is the premiere date - as they say, check local listings for air time), and, regrettably, it will be its last.  The show's creators decided that now was a good time to stop.

I can see why.  Frankie and Mike Heck's children are getting old, and, as you may have already noticed, so are the jokes.  Axl has graduated from college and now has to make his way in the world as his own man - and trust me, there's not much humor in a subject like that.  Sue is now a college junior, while Brick - that cute, quirky kid we all remember from his grade school days - is a high school sophomore and his voice is beginning to change.  And how many more work mishaps can Frankie and Mike have?  Simply put, the comic possibilities of the Heck family are close to being exhausted, and show creators Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline (who based Orson, the fictional Indiana town the show is set in, on the real Indiana town of Jasper - Heline is from Muncie) are right to end it now, while it's still funny.

"The Middle" is a relatable show to anyone who's had to muddle through bad breaks in small-town or suburban America - namely, almost all of us - and its comic twists and turns are hilarious enough to avoid the use of a laugh track (which is dumb anyway),  thanks to the idiosyncratic traits of the characters.  You have Frankie's overworrying, Mike's lack of emotion, guitar-burnout Axl's failure to connect with reality, and Brick's introverted nature and obsession with books and print fonts, as well as his penchant for lowering his head and repeating in a whisper the last few words of a sentence.  But Sue, with her eternally and unrealistically optimistic outlook - punctuated by a record of failure that doesn't get her down - takes the cake. As played by Eden Sher, Sue is a bundle of nerdy, nervy energy that offers light in an otherwise depressing situation.  

Of course, the Hecks have had to deal with their own shortcomings even while being reminded how imperfect they are by the quintessential perfect family, the Donahues, those well-traveled, well-heeled overachievers, with their perfect matriarch Nancy Donahue (who is not, as far as I can make out, named for the veteran fashion model of the same name, who of course is a friend of mine).  But when they have to deal with the even more down-and-out and totally uncouth Glossner family (with a mom played by Brooke Shields), they're only reminded of how things could be much worse.

I'm going to miss "The Middle," and once it's gone, I won't have much to watch on TV.  "This Is Us" - that's it, really.  The only other TV programs  I watch anymore are documentaries, TV news broadcasts, and old reruns of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," which, ironically, was set in a TV newsroom.   

(Oh, and also reruns of Bob Newhart's sitcom - not the 1980s show, the 1970s show with Suzanne Pleshette.)    

Tuning In

I thought I'd never again write about television, as I don't watch much of it these days, but I have been watching a couple of shows during the 2016-17 season, and I have a few things to say about them, plus a couple of others, on this Christmas Eve.  I would have gotten to it sooner, but the election (which is finally over) kept getting in the way. 

Perhaps the brightest and most endearing new show of the 2106-17 season is "This Is Us," an NBC drama about an extended family.  In case you haven't been hiding under a rock lately, "This Is Us" follows a young white couple, Jack and Rebecca Pearson, two fraternal twins named Kevin and Kate, and a black man named Randall, who was adopted by a family after being abandoned in a firehouse by his birth father.   Everyone knows the twist by now: Jack and Rebecca are the parents of the twins and the adoptee, and flashbacks reveal how they grew up, with Kevin becoming a television actor, Kate dealing with a weight problem (and finding a boyfriend, Toby, who's also dealing with a weight problem) and Randall becoming a New York trader and living in a posh neighborhood in northern New Jersey.  We see how the family members love each other and deal with crises and moments of truth, like when Randall finds his biological father, and other plot twists you don't see coming that seem to leap out of nowhere.

One unresolved plot twist so far: Jack turns out to have died many years ago, but we don't know when he died or what he died of.  We only know that Kate keeps his ashes in her apartment.

I have to give a shout-out to Mandy Moore, who plays Rebecca, the family matriarch.  People who remember her as a teen pop singer at the turn of the millennium already know that she was one of the few teenage stars of the time who had genuine singing talent, and they probably knew she could act as well, but in "This is Us," she gives some heartwarming and winning performances that demonstrate just how much she's matured the sixteen years since she turned sixteen.  (Yes, Mandy Moore is 32 now.  Doesn't that make you feel old?)

Is  "This Is Us" the new "Parenthood"?  Not really - for one thing, it's darker and more unsettling than Jason Katims' much-missed show about the Braverman clan - but it's definitely a satisfying and even spellbinding series, always ready to surprise you once you think you have it figured out.

One show I wish I had time for - I don't have time for it because I'm writing this blog - is ABC's "Designated Survivor," starring Kiefer Sutherland as a low-level Cabinet secretary in Washington  who suddenly becomes President of the United States, when his predecessor and the rest of the Cabinet are killed in a terrorist attack during the State of the Union address.  My mother likes it.  I'll have to binge-watch it through On Demand in the near future.  One ABC show I could do without is "Speechless," about a nutty mom whose life revolves around accommodating her children and especially her older son, who suffers from cerebral palsy and needs a typewriter keyboard to communicate.  Minnie Driver plays the mom, and she somehow fails at being a sympathetic character; moreover, she seems to be re-creating her hovering-mother persona from her role in "About a Boy" (a much better show, but Nielsen families decided otherwise) to the point of phoning it in.  And this is Minnie Driver - probably one of the best British actresses of her generation - that we're talking about.

And old ABC favorites?  I'm still a fan of "The Middle," but "Modern Family" got so tiresome and predictable,  I just stopped watching.  I haven't been compelled to catch up on it.  I have a job that requires me to periodically work on Wednesday nights, so I miss "Modern Family" a lot anyway, but when I have the opportunity to see it on On Demand, I just can't be bothered.  Both "The Middle" and "Modern Family" are both about family units that get into unenviable situations, but you sympathize with the Hecks on the former show because they're lower-middle-class Midwesterners without many prospects.  The Pritchetts and the Dunphys on the latter show are upper-middle-class elitist Southern Californians who exhibit all the smugness that applies, and it's hard to laugh when they get into trouble when you know they still live well in the end.  

Or to explain it in a political way, the Pritchetts and the Dunphys behave like centrist Democrats, while the Hecks are blue-collar populists.  And we all know who won that battle.