Since 2007, TV Club has dissected television episode by episode. Beginning this September, The A.V. Club will also step back to take a wider view in our new TV Reviews section. With pre-air reviews of new shows, returning favorites, and noteworthy finales, TV Reviews doesn’t replace TV Club—as usual, some shows will get the weekly treatment—but it adds a look at a bigger picture.
In the middle of the 100th episode of ABC’s family sitcom The Middle, mom Frankie Heck (Patricia Heaton) shares a quiet moment with her husband Mike (Neil Flynn). “Think about how much this town has done for us,” she says, the two of them sitting in sleeping bags against the float they’ll drive the next morning for their town’s centennial. “Well, after this we’re even,” he says. It’s the kind of punchline that would land differently on Modern Family, whose industrial line-delivery system spares no sentimentality for a snappy reversal. The Middle is more humane, and is focuses on the characters as people, not as open-mic comics. Frankie and Mike take a couple of jokeless minutes to reminisce about how they wound up in little old Orson, Indiana, a pair of stressed-out working-class strivers with three wonderfully exhausting children. For a celebration of such an overlooked stalwart, it’s beautifully restrained and an unexpectedly calm moment in the chaos of financial obligations and fast-food dinners, but it’s just right. The great family sitcom of the 2010s hasn’t arrived exactly. It’s still arriving.
That’s partly literal. While the Fox-produced, four-time Best Comedy Emmy-winner Modern Family is available on Blu-ray up to its latest season, Warner’s The Middle is lagging a year behind schedule, its third season debuting on DVD (no high-definition release in sight) at the onset of its fifth. Nevertheless, Modern Family is slipping in the ratings, and The Middle’s last season was its highest rated yet, averaging 8.4 million viewers (a million fewer than Modern Family’s first, and lowest-rated, season). The show keeps chugging along in the background, punching its time card at the beginning of ABC’s Wednesday night comedy block every week.
The comparison is easy, the two sitcoms anchoring an evening, but it’s also illuminating even beyond the obvious class and geographic distinctions of The Middle. For instance, both shows open their current seasons with parents dropping off their children at school. On Modern Family, Phil and Gloria decide to get coffee together to help ease the transition as their high school freshmen pull away. At the coffee shop they wind up as background extras in a commercial, where their sadness leads to I Love Lucy-style antics that ruin take after take. Empathy is for suckers, at least until the scheduled heart-warming ending. On The Middle, Frankie is sending her eldest, Axl (Charlie McDermott), off to college, and he’s comically eager to leave, the episode mining laughs from her clinging to him even as he’s an ungrateful brat. Once at school, Axl abandons his family for an impromptu dorm party without even a hug goodbye, leaving Frankie to unleash her maternal feelings on his unresponsive roommate. After a brief shot of the ride home as a teary Frankie laughs at her lot in life, she walks into her usually busy home in a dim wide shot. The emptiness is overwhelming; even the remaining kids are quiet. That is, until Axl announces himself by complaining about an empty pantry, having made the 45-minute drive from college to retrieve some more supplies. Their heartwarming ending? Frankie rolls her eyes and thanks God that he doesn’t live there anymore. On Modern Family, the emotional honesty serves comedy. On The Middle, the comedy serves emotional honesty.