MiddleMan Mania

This coming Monday night is the debut of the new series, The MiddleMan, on ABC Family at 8 pm ET/PT. It is a series created by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who has worked on many genre shows over the years including Lost, Charmed, Medium, and The Chronicle. The series is based on the Viper Comics series of the same name, which itself was created when Javier wasn't able to sell the concept as series initially. The complete run of the series will be collected in The Middleman: The Collected Series Indispensability by Viper Comics in July.

At Gallifrey One, Javier joined us for the SFTV panel and talked a bit about the series and how he'd had the script locked down before the writer's strike and filmed the pilot during the strike and then got the series pickup once the strike was over. He split his time between working on the pilot and joining picket lines. He was excited to have his first show as a series picked up (he'd had a few pilots before this not get picked up). The series very much will draw on its comic roots, with the pilot episode and the third episode being a faithful adaptation of two of the three arcs done in the comic series.

As part of the promotion for the debut of the show, the pilot episode is available to download for free for a limited time on Apple's iTunes as well as on XBox 360. I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to more of the series.

Javier has been all over the place of late doing lots of interviews on the show and there's a fairly comprehenisive fan site, MiddleFan, up and running already. They've been keeping track of all of the news and interviews on their News Page. Javier has also been blogging a lot about the show's production at the MiddleBlog. ABC Family has been doing their part with the official ABC Family Middleman pages.