"Fighting evil, so you don't have to."

It isn't often that a decent show appears in the summer television schedules. Relegation to the off-season can be a sign that the show isn't good enough attract viewers during the regular TV season. Or it may simply be too offbeat for the same. These are swiftly-cancelled filler, disappearing without complaint or quirky annoying peanut-posting campaigns. Then there are those which defy expectations. Bona fide hits, such as Mad Men, are rare; the more likely route to longevity is to become a cult favourite. ABC Family's The Middleman seems destined—indeed, designed—to fit snugly into this last category. Too goofy for the mainstream, it's also hampered by a budget that even the most basic of basic cable hour-longs might be ashamed of. But what it has in spades is charm and a lack of preciousness which lifts it above the unoriginal premise and similar, more self-consciously offbeat fare. Enough, at least, to ensure it finds a niche populated by kids looking for a clever actioner that doesn't speak down to them, and by older kids and adults charmed by a mix of pop culture references both familiar enough to evoke Buffy and its contemporaries, and obscure enough to make them feel smart.

On paper it seems to hold little promise: "A young woman is recruited by a secret agency to fight against evil forces." More Men in Black than Buffy, it nevertheless offers little variation on the age-old trope. A world of aliens and monsters (and superintelligent, genetically-engineered primates) coexisting alongside the world of men. Sometimes peacefully, other times less so. And we all know what happens when someone from the outside discovers this secret world. As website TV Tropes puts it:

Beware, if you are discovered breaking the masquerade, you must either become part of it, or join those who fight or police it.

And that's pretty much what we have here. Wendy (Natalie Morales) is a geeky temp secretary who during one posting is attacked by what she describes as a "hentai tentacle monster". The beast is dealt with by an implacable stranger, the eponymous "Middleman" (Matt Keeslar), who fights evil using an array of whizzy gadgets supplied by an unknown power. Impressed by Wendy's poise in unusual circumstances ("95% of people would fill their shorts and be eaten"), he offers her a job as his apprentice/sidekick.



The Middleman doesn't wear its influences on its sleeve so much as have them tattooed on its face. Indeed, the pilot is a Frankenstein's Monster of Someone Else's Ideas. But what judicious employment of these concepts allows is room for the dialogue and characters to percolate without having to spend too long explaining the set-up. And while it doesn't subvert the trope entirely, it does undermine it with clever digs at both its own and the genre's preposterousness ("that belonged to my father, who disappeared in mysterious and as-yet-unexplained circumstances") and via the fourth wall-breaking captions. The dialogue is equally sly, assaulting the viewer with pop culture references and rat-a-tat sparring modelled after a classic screwball comedy. Morales' delivery is perfect: rapid-fire and deadpan, she's more Garofolo than Gellar, though hotter and geekier than both. Keeslar, channelling Dudley Do-Right and Constable Benton Fraser—shit, how amazing would Paul Gross be in this part?—isn’t quite so confident, but his might be the harder role: a former Navy Seal, the character is written as an endearing throwback to a more innocent time, ruthless, intelligent and maybe a little dim—all at the same time. And all the while spouting goshdang-it-to-heck dialogue (he never swears, except when he does).

But if the show seldom pauses long enough to allow appreciation some of the more delicious lines, nor does it allow reflection on its weaker moments; the throw-everything-at-the-viewer approach is the verbal equivalent of the visual gags in an Airplane!-style spoof; if you hear a bad line, it's OK because there'll be a quite splendid one along in just a minute. Only a few moments spoil the party: a series of gangster film quotations that not once stray from the obvious (The Godfather, Scarface—would something from White Heat have been amiss?), and a Planet of the Apes reference which I'm surprised didn't get left on The Simpsons' cutting-room floor where they found it. The show runs out of breath halfway through when Wendy's boyfriend reappears, a boring dick undeserving of both his screen time and Wendy's forgiveness. But it gets its second wind as it approaches a denouement marred only by the obvious deficiencies in the budget.

So ignore that, throw in a ridiculously human robot with a prickly demeanour, and a black-and-white aside that ends with an image of the Middleman holding an umbrella and Wendy wearing a scuba mask, and you're left with what has the potential to be one of the oddest and smartest shows you'll see this summer.