EPISODE 121 -- THE MIDDLEMAN
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
This week's episode is a little early for the holiday. Because I ask you, What says Thanksgiving more than an online newsletter?
Not long ago I got into my car, turned the key, put my hand on the gear shift – and felt something odd. Out of place. Rubbery.
Looking down, I saw a lime green wristband wrapped around its top with two words embossed on it: “The Middleman.”
Suddenly I was back in the fall of 2013. Having recently completed my MFA at UCLA, I was spending most of my time angling for managers and writing spec scripts (aka audition samples). One of my classmates was working as an assistant to TV writer extraordinaire Javier Grillo-Marxauch, who had written for everything from “Lost” to “Medium” to “Law and Order: SVU.” (Dude's got range.) And my friend reached out to see whether I might be willing to help staff an unusual event.
In 2008, Grillo-Marxauch had launched his own show, “The Middleman”, on ABC Family, about a struggling artist (played by the fantastic, joyous Natalie Morales) who gets recruited to help a secret organization fight bad guys. Critics loved it. T.V. Guide said it’s “like ‘Men In Black II’ if Will Smith’s character was a geeky girl.” Newsarama said it’s “the kind of show you’ll want to watch repeatedly to catch a line you missed the first time.” A.V. Club and Variety, too, gave the show high marks.
Yet, perhaps because the show was on a network known way more for girls staring daggers as they hide who they just murdered than geeky banter sci-fi, “The Middleman” aired only twelve episodes before being cancelled (no doubt in favor of "Teen Girls who Are Actually Late 20s Do Bad Things and Sulk While Pining for That Boy").
But then at San Diego Comic Con the next summer, the cast did a table reading of its unfilmed season finale (which has the great name “The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse”), to an unexpectedly huge crowd, which freaking loved it. And four years later -- almost a generation in TV time -- Grillo-Marxauch crowdfunded another cast table read, this time for a whole new story – “The Pan-Universal Parental Reconciliation” -- that would become a graphic novel.
That was the event, held at a sweet art house theater in downtown Los Angeles, that I was recruited to help at.
I remember mostly the bare bones of the day – the cast doing their initial readthrough in a loft early in the day; the public event later, to another packed audience; the happy presence of Javi’s family. And somewhere in there along the way, I got this green wristband, which I promptly wrapped around the gear shift of my car, and have left it there since, often toying with it in an absent minded way, but never really noticing it.
Until the other day, when all of a sudden it became this spiritual time machine, transporting me back to that event and helping me notice something massive that I had totally missed then, specifically the feeling of that moment. The sense of being in the presence of a lot of people who not only loved that story and those characters but who found in it something that was liberating. From what – Normal Life? Self-doubt? The humdrum cop show ordinariness of so much of the rest of television? Maybe it was different things for different people. But there was just this great sense of relief to the group, like that easy laughter that sometimes happens falls out of us like a gentle rain and just makes you want to sink in and enjoy life deeper.
Relief, and gratitude. Not the polite, expected “Thank you Grandma for the fruit cake that we will have to throw out because we do not wish to get dentures as teenagers”, but something that bubbled up from the being there in the presence of this thing that was was familiar but now suddenly recognized as an ongoing source of hope and possibility.
I know how overstated that sounds. It’s not like there were people crying in the aisles and begging Javi never to leave them. It was a lot quieter than that. But there was something there, a sense of wonder and humility. We didn't come here asking for much, but wow is this a nice moment.
As I drove the other day, that’s what I kept remembering, that quiet sense of wonder and gratitude and relief I had witnessed in that group. In a strange way it reminded me of this passage I recently read from “The Waste Lands”, the third book of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books. The premise of the series is that all of reality is slowly falling apart; and in one already much-decayed corner of it, a gunslinger named Roland is making his way towards the Dark Tower at its center to try and save the day.
Over the course of the novels he’s joined by others from different periods of our own reality, among them Jake, a little boy pulled out of 1960s Manhattan. And during the process of his “drawing” to Roland’s world, Jake comes upon a razed lot where a deli once stood. Heeding some strange instinct Jake climbs a fence into the lot, and comes upon of all things a rose.
What happens next:
The rose began to open before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each burning with its own secret fury. He had never seen anything so intensely and utterly alive in his whole life....
Then the heart of the rose opened for him, exposing a yellow dazzle of light, and all thought was swept away on a wave of wonder. Jake thought for a moment that what he was seeing was only pollen which had been invested with the supernatural glow which lived at the heart of every object in this deserted clearing—he thought it even though he had never heard of pollen within a rose. He leaned closer and saw that the concentrated circle of blazing yellow was not pollen at all. It was a sun: a vast forge burning at the center of this rose growing in the purple grass....
The closer he looks, the more amazing it becomes: “He leaned closer to the rose and saw that its core was not just one sun but many...perhaps all suns contained with a ferocious yet fragile shell.” All of creation, contained within that beautiful flower.
My "opening rose" didn’t have the dramatic contours of Jake's; you definitely wouldn't label it what theologians call a “theophany” -- God showing up to trumpets and kick lines and blowing out the speakers. No, it was more like going to a holiday dinner with just a couple people and discovering in that simple candle-lit meal that the numbers or production values don’t matter after all, everything is there.
But when I think about Thanksgiving this year, in the midst of so much I guess I’m tempted to worry (or complain) about, my mind keeps going back to that once-overlooked, now-strange moment where I was given a glimpse of something. What a story can do, can be for people, maybe. Of the fact that miracles really do still happen. (Making a TV show, even a show that not one person ever likes, is so damn hard.)
And maybe also of the God who for me is behind it all, eating his caramel corn and laughing easy with us at every punch line, every opportunity, every happy day.
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Thanks very much for your continued support of this newsletter. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy doing it. If there’s ever a topic you’d like me to consider, or you have any comments or questions, feel free to write me at popculturespiritwow@gmail.com.
And if you like what you’re reading, recommend it to a friend! Call it a Christmas gift; tell them it was very expensive. I promise, your secret is safe with me.
++ LINKS ++
This new Apple Christmas ad is a lot like that U.K. tear jerker I posted a few weeks back. But weirder. Like way, way weirder.
Speaking of things that are weirder, here’s the first ad for the new Cars movie. Which looks like a fun time, IF YOU LIKE CRYING.
The Star Wars media campaign is ramping up. Yesterday the press reported that these new stand alone movies were actually George Lucas’ idea. -- though the actually idea of doing a movie about stealing the Death Star plans, which is so obvious how did we all not demand that?, came from Lucasfilm’s Chief Creative Officer John Knoll.
Lucas apparently thought there was a lot of room to explore the whole Jedi mythology. And I want to be all over that, but if it sounds anything like this, better to leave it alone, George. Leave it alone. Back away from the storytelling.
In looking for that Jedi clip, I also found this Q&A with J. J. Abrams, which includes a great Lucas moment, more crazy Jared Leto and a momentary existential crisis.
And then there's always this.
As we say in my family, “Gobble Gobble.” (It’s weird, we just say that. I don’t know why.) Hope your Thanksgiving allows you a moment to sit back and consider the good things of your life this year. And the strength of mind to avoid the insanity that is Black Friday. Remember, it’s only black because we all insist on entering into it. (Maybe that’s true of a lot of things.)
