[Editor's Note: TVWW contributor Donna J. Plesh died April 2, 2015, from ovarian cancer. She was 71. Donna covered television since the early 1980s, initially for the Orange County Register and its TV magazine. She also was a member of the Television Critics Association. Donna was always a cheerful spirit within the TVWW network and often gave readers a kind, up-close viewpoint in her interviews with a wide variety of television stars. She will be missed.]
Overrated. Underrated. Under the radar. These are words and terms often associated with sports teams and players, movies, and just about anything else that can be rated in some way, including TV shows. Prime example: ABC’s family comedy The Middle. Neil Flynn, one of the show’s stars, is fine with how his show is commented on, in any of those terms.
“I would say we are under the radar,” said Flynn in an interview. “I hear that we are underrated a lot, which leads me to believe that we are not all that underrated, just because a lot of people say we are underrated. Some shows and some performers seem to crack through that barrier and others never do. I don’t get hung up with that, and I don’t mind being considered under the radar or underrated, because we have sneakily finished 100 episodes,” he added.
On the ABC Wednesday night sitcom (at 8 ET), Flynn plays Mike Heck, manager of the local quarry in fictional Orson, Ind., and husband to Frankie (series star Patricia Heaton) and children Axl (Charlie McDermott), Sue (Eden Sher) and Brick (Atticus Shaffer). The Heck family often struggles to make ends meet, which is the norm for many families living in the small towns in the Midwest, i.e. the “middle.”
The “middle” is home territory to Flynn, who was born in Chicago, grew up in Waukegan, Ill., and attended Bradley University, also in Illinois, the state next door to Indiana. Series star Patricia Heaton is from the Cleveland area, and Ohio is the state also next door to Indiana. The executive producers are Eileen Heisler, who is from Chicago, and DeAnn Heline, who was born in Indiana but was raised in Cincinnati. The two producers met while they were attending Indiana University, which is in… the “middle.”
The Middle is in its fifth season, and the show’s upcoming fourth episode is No. 100, a milestone number of episodes for a TV series. The show also seems to be under the radar when it comes to awards, like the Emmys, and many viewers and TV critics feel the show is underrated. It usually ranks in the high 30s in the weekly Nielsen ratings, very respectable numbers considering there are usually more than 100 shows rated weekly. (Thus putting The Middle above… the middle.)
The Middle airs an hour before Modern Family, the four-time Emmy Award-winner as Best Comedy Series and a ratings superstar for ABC. Modern Family gets the most promos and publicity push from the network. But that, too, doesn’t bother Flynn.
“We will go on for probably another year or two, and maybe it will get more attention, but I think we will be more remembered fondly when we are off the air and in syndication. I think a lot of people will discover the show in syndication, and it will be a show that is remembered. But right now there is a loyal block of viewers that watch it weekly and I don’t want to disregard their loyalty,” he said.
Flynn said that storylines on The Middle sometimes come from personal stories, including one of his and one of Heaton’s. “Any story you tell [on set] might end up as inspiration for the writers, so you have to be aware of that. In the first season, Patty was talking about having had an exchange student for a short time, and that became an episode where the Hecks had an exchange student.
“I had mentioned that my cat died, and it became a B plot in one episode where Mike had a cat at the quarry that died. After my cat died, my brother said he thought that my cat had humanized me. I took a little bit of offense to that. I didn’t understand what it meant… but I think Patty said on the show to Mike, ‘It humanizes you.’ When I told the story, I said that when my cat died that I am done loving things, and they [the writers] had Mike say that as well,” Flynn said.
The actor grew up in a large family and he said the house on The Middle is a lot like the house he grew up in, but “more crowded. Six children. Three boys and three girls. And as we started to leave the house, another [child] one joined us, so we had eight people in the house the whole time growing up and it was not a big house. It should have been a social experiment. There should have been cameras there to see that none of us devoured another one of us. It was a fine, enjoyable childhood. I would not like to live with seven people now, but it was fine then. Draw whatever conclusion you will from that, but I decided to live alone for most of my adulthood,” he said.
Many TV viewers will remember Flynn for his role as the nameless janitor on Scrubs for eight seasons. “Scrubs was a lot of fun. I’ll say this [The Middle] is the most satisfying show I’ve done. I have to work a lot harder, and there are a lot more hours on this show. It’s a totally different experience and kind of entertainment than Scrubs was, so they are equally enjoyable and I am equally proud of both,” he said.