Favorite Things: Day Sixteen

Today I decided to talk about The Middleman. Over three mini-series (all helpfully collected now in one volume), Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Les McClaine created one of my favorite cast of characters from the last few years. The set-up is thus: The Middleman, a freelance operative who deals with all of the weird shit that abounds across the Earth. Along with him are his trainee, Wendy Watson, and their bitchy robot secretary, Ida. While that sounds all well and good, it's the whip-smart dialogue, the ingenious use of just about every genre convention (talking monkeys, ninjas, Mexican wrestlers, etc.) and the general insanity of the book that rises it above.

But, the creation of a fantastic new comic series wasn't enough, so they made a TV show out of it, and I love it. In fact, it's easily my favorite new show of 2008. I'll be honest, it seems to take a different tone to the comic series, where that was more of an "X-Files meets Bond movie" vibe, the TV series, is more of a "X-Files meets 1960's Batman TV Series" mixture. Matt Kleesar brings a much different note to the character of the Middleman, giving him a much more clean-cut demeanor than the one that seemed to be portrayed in the comics. But it works, and it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they're going to get a second season order, but at least there should be a DVD release of the 12 episodes that were aired, so we hav ethat going for us. Anyway, here are some of the PSA's that they recorded to support the series, they're a hoot.