Hacker Cinema
The Middle
2009 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 9 seasons
Created by Eileen Heisler, DeAnn Heline
The daily mishaps of a married woman and her semi-dysfunctional family and their attempts to survive life in general in the city of Orson, Indiana.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
> Al was a shoe salesman. Peggy was hot in high school.
They were both hot in high school. They peaked in high school and married/created a family with their high school sweetheart. That's the entire point of the show.
> They had kids. They took care of them.
They were also neglectful and callous.
> They didn't exactly love each other, but they didn't hated one another also.
Did you watch the show? They most certainly verged on hating each other, and were never as ambivalent as you make out.
> The most realistically portrayed family on TV in decades.
The Middle. Malcom in the Middle. That 70's Show. Any of a dozen "prestige" television shows that aren't sitcoms.
Come on. This entire argument is ridiculous.
The problem scale of Roseanne is within a believable distance from my own. I have had to dismantle washing machines and clothes dryers to repair them. A show like Seinfeld would make the appliance repairman a character and the repair would be the secondary theme of the episode. A show like Friends would either not acknowledge the existence of laundry machines, or pretend they do not ever break. The only show currently on broadcast television in which I would believe a broken washing machine as a plot element is The Middle.
Here's a potential middle-class The Middle plot line for you: the Glaussners wash the mud off of their off-road 4-wheelers in the street using the Heck household's hose. They do not turn the water off. It runs all week, straight into the gutter, before someone notices and turns it off. The Hecks get an unexpected $300 water bill, which passes unnoticed in their huge monthly stack of bills, as they pay the usual, average monthly amount. Then one day, their water is shut off, and they can't get it turned back on until after Mike's next paycheck.
That's a believable middle class problem. Can you guess why it's believable? Because it's based on a true story.
Modern Family, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Middle, Raising Hope, How I Met Your Mother, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt were all fairly recent examples of decent modern sitcoms (and wow that list is bigger than I thought it'd be), and for the most part, generally centered around middle class families/people. Some are a bit more outlandish and over-the-top at times, but that can also be their appeal.
By modern, I also mean they follow a continuing story arc episode-to-episode, so while you could watch any episode in isolation, you get a lot more if you know backstory and the characters. They're also all "single camera" shows (no laugh track) which IMHO is a much better style, and allows them to be more creative, have a continuing story, and frankly, be funnier than the (pause for laughter) lines in a show like Big Bang Theory.
I remember growing up as a lower-middle class midwestern kid, Roseanne was a show I loved, because I identified with it so much. Dan and Roseanne were my parents, and my friends were just like Darlene and Becky.
Another similar show from that era is "Grace Under Fire".
As a 35-yo upper-middle class guy still in the midwest, I look at what's on TV (both broadcast and Netflix/Amazon/etc.) and see none of that representation of middle class America. Besides "The Middle", which I still identify with, there are no successful middle-class sitcoms on TV.