The Middle
| Television series | |
|---|---|
| German title | The Middle |
| Original title | The Middle |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Year (s) | 2009-2018 |
| Production company |
Warner Bros. Television , Blackie and Blondie Productions |
| length | approx. 22 minutes |
| Episodes | 215 in 9 seasons ( list ) |
| genre | Sitcom |
| idea | Eileen Heisler, DeAnn Heline |
| production | DeAnn Heline, Eileen Heisler |
| music | Joey Newman |
| First broadcast | September 30, 2009 (USA) on ABC |
| German-language first broadcast |
March 1, 2012 on ZDFneo |
| occupation | |
The Middle is an American sitcom produced by Warner Bros. Television from 2009 to 2018 and broadcast by ABC . DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler had the idea for the series.
In Germany, ZDFneo broadcast the first five seasons from March 1, 2012 to October 4, 2014. Since January 2, 2016, ProSieben has been showing the series on Saturday afternoon in double episodes, starting with the first episode, and since August also Monday to Friday mornings.
In January 2017, ABC extended the series for a ninth season, and in August 2017 it was announced that this would be the end of the series. The broadcast of the final season began on October 3, 2017. The one-hour series finale aired on May 22, 2018 in the United States and on April 15, 2019 in Germany.
action
The series focuses on the medium-sized Heck family who live in the fictional town of Orson, Indiana . The plot is told from the point of view of the mother Frankie Heck. Central themes of the series are financial hardships, difficulties in school, at work and later in college, all kinds of social and family obligations and the everyday life of a family of five.
characters
main characters
Frankie Heck
- Frankie is the mother of Axl, Sue and Brick and the main emotional character of the series. She comments on the plot of the series from off . At the beginning of the series she works as a saleswoman at Ehlert Motors , a car dealership, but is not very successful in this job. At the beginning of the 4th season she is finally released and shortly afterwards begins training as a dental assistant, which she then also works as. She regards the family as the most important part of her life, despite the frustrations that often come with it.
Mike Heck
- Mike is Frankie's husband and works as a manager in a quarry. He acts in a more pragmatic way and often speaks more directly than Frankie, which saves some stuck situations. However, he finds it difficult to express his own feelings.
Axl Heck
- Axl is the eldest son in the family and a talented football player on the school team, but his other academic performance is below average. At home he is mostly a rebellious teenage son who is pubescent and annoys his siblings, but especially his mother, with his behavior (for example, he prefers to lounge on the sofa in his underpants in front of the TV) and a lack of family commitment . School and human success comes easily to him. In positive phases he can activate a considerable potential of intelligence and in some cases achieve good academic performance. Most of the time, however, he enjoys the simple, "beautiful" life.
Sue Heck
- Sue is the middle child and the only daughter of Frankie and Mike. She seems very naive and awkward in her behavior. She suffers from her braces and the constant failure to be accepted into school activities, but nevertheless has an optimism that is invincible in almost all situations and in almost all strokes of fate. If she loses this optimism, she can act out her pessimistic side just as manically. She rarely succeeds in their relationships. If she has already reached a solid relationship base, the partner usually turns out to be problematic.
Brick stern
- Brick is the youngest child in the family. He reads every printed work that he can get his hands on, be it books, magazines or mail order catalogs. He appears very intelligent, but has great difficulty interacting adequately with other people outside his family. For example, his attention span is very small and, apart from his books and the associated fantasy worlds, he quickly loses interest in what is going on around him. At his elementary school, he therefore also attends a kind of remedial class in which other children with behavioral problems also take part. Every now and then he lowers his head and audibly whispers the last word he said. He may later drop some of his tics. It often turns out that these emerged not least because, as the third child in a rather poor working-class family, he did not receive the necessary attention that a child would have needed with his abilities. In the middle school he develops into a first-class student, not least due to his great reading, who nevertheless often upsets his teachers with his otherness. He loses his shyness of other people in the course of the series and even begins an initially friendly and later love relationship with Cindy. His small circle of friends consists of similar eccentrics as he is himself.
Minor characters
bob
- Bob works for Ehlert Motors and is Frankie's best friend. He repeatedly covers Frankie's alleged misconduct in front of her boss, which is caused by her family life. Mike distrusts Bob because he cannot understand the friendship between a man and a woman and suspects that Bob has deeper feelings.
Don Ehlert
- Ehlert is the thoroughly capitalist-minded owner of the dealership where Bob and Frankie worked until they were fired. Frankie is threatened with dismissal all the time because her boss doesn't trust a woman to do such a job. His sexist behavior manifests itself in other ways, for example when he repeatedly assigns Frankie to supposedly feminine activities such as making coffee.
Aunt Edie and Aunt Ginny
- The aunts are Frankie's oldest great aunts who need her help. Both die in the course of the series (Aunt Ginny dies at the age of 100 in season 3, Aunt Edie dies at 96 in season 6).
Rusty heck
- Rusty is the brother of Mike Heck (seen in the 2012 episode: The Performance)
Brad
- Brad is Sue's boyfriend and later ex-boyfriend Frankie and Mike assume is gay. Even after the breakup, the two of them, who share a love of the fine arts and their excessive enthusiasm, remain close friends.
Carly
- Carly is Sue's best friend and like Sue is rather naive in her behavior.
Nancy Donahue
- Nancy Donahue is the Hecks' neighbor and her supposedly exemplary and carefree family life, which is strongly outwardly carried, often gives rise to arguments and envy.
Cindy
- Cindy becomes a boyfriend over the course of the series. At first a harmless friendship, which both welds together through their predisposition to tics and strange behavior and makes a strange impression on outsiders, this ultimately becomes a first love for both of them.
The Glossners
- Rita Glossner ( Brooke Shields ) lives without a husband with her three rowdy sons Derrick, Wade and "Diaper", whom she describes as "charismatic", as a neighbor of the Hecks in a shabby house. The Glossners make the neighborhood - and especially the Hecks - life hell with their audacity, destructiveness and constant theft.
Lexie Brooks
- Lexie Brooks ( Daniela Bobadilla ) is a student at East Indiana State University, where Axl and Sue also study. She comes from a wealthy family and may not be conscious of the middle class lifestyle. She is Sue's best friend and falls in love with Axl over the course of the series.
Cast and dubbing
Patricia Heaton
Neil Flynn
Atticus Shaffer
The series is set to music at the Cinephon in Berlin . Kim Hasper writes the dialogue books and directed the dialogue up to the fifth season. The following dialogue directors were Hilke Flickenschildt (season 6 and 7), Reinhard Knapp (season 7) and Pierre Peters-Arnolds (season 8).
| actor | Role name | Main role | Supporting role | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patricia Heaton | Frances "Frankie" Heck | 1.01-9.24 | Victoria Storm | |
| Neil Flynn | Michael "Mike" Heck Jr. | 1.01-9.24 | Thomas Nero Wolff | |
| Charlie McDermott | Axl Redford stern | 1.01-9.24 | Nicolás Artajo | |
| Eden Sher | Sue Sue Heck | 1.01-9.24 | Julia Meynen | |
| Atticus Shaffer | Brick Ishmail Heck | 1.01-9.24 | Anton Kurth | |
| Chris Kattan | Bob Weaver | 1.01-2.24 | 3.01-4.03, 5.21 | Bernhard Völger |
| Brian Doyle-Murray | Don Ehlert | 1.01–6.11, 9.09 | Jürgen Kluckert | |
| Jeanette Miller | Aunt Edie | 1.01-4.08 | Jessy Rameik | |
| Frances Bay | Aunt Ginny | 1.01-3.13 | ||
| Jen Ray | Nancy Donahue | 1.05-9.24 | Angela Ringer | |
| Beau Wirick | Sean Donahue | 1.05-9.24 | Konrad Bösherz | |
| Brock Ciarlelli | Brad Bottig | 1.06-9.24 | Dirk Petrick | |
| Blaine Saunders | Carly | 1.12–6.11, 9.11 | Maria Koschny | |
| John Gammon | Darrin McGrew | 1.15-6.18 | Vanya Gerick | |
| Tommy Bechtold | Kenny | 5.01-9.15 | ||
| Alphonso McAuley | Hutch | 5.05-9.15 | Bastian Sierich | |
| Daniela Bobadilla | Lexie | 7.11-9.24 | Jodie Blank |
Production and broadcast
Both the exterior and interior shots of the series are filmed at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank , California . The television series is produced by Warner Bros. and Blackie and Blondie Productions .
- United States
ABC initially only ordered thirteen episodes and added them to the 2009-2010 schedule. The series received a full season of 22 episodes on October 8, 2009. On January 12, 2010, ABC ordered a second season of The Middle.
While the extension for a third season took place in January 2011, ABC announced the production of a fourth season in May 2012, the airing of which was to be seen from September 26, 2012 to May 22, 2013. The fifth season was shown on ABC from September 25, 2013 through May 21, 2014. On September 24, 2014, ABC began broadcasting the sixth season.
- Germany
In autumn 2011, the public service digital broadcaster ZDFneo secured the German broadcasting rights and showed the first two seasons from March 1 to May 7, 2012. The third season was shown there from July 17 to August 2, 2012. The fourth season was broadcast from May 15 to July 30, 2013, also on ZDFneo. The fifth season was broadcast between August 30 and October 4, 2014.
In November 2015, ProSieben acquired the broadcasting rights to the series, which was first broadcast on Saturdays from January 2, 2016, and later in the weekday morning and afternoon programs. Between October 4 and November 4, 2016, the sixth and seventh seasons were first broadcast. The eighth season was broadcast in the evening program from April 9, 2018 with interruption until October 22, 2018. The ninth and final season was also broadcast in the evening program from October 29, 2018 to April 15, 2019.
- Austria
ORF eins has been showing the series since January 2, 2013 . ProSieben has been broadcasting the first season of the series since January 2, 2016.
Episode list
DVD release
United States
- Season 1 was released on August 31, 2010
- Season 2 was released on September 27, 2011
- Season 3 was released on October 8, 2013
- Season 4 was released on February 25, 2014
- Season 5 was released on October 7, 2014
- Season 6 was released on October 27, 2015
- Season 7 was released on November 15, 2016
- Season 8 was released on August 15, 2017
United Kingdom
- Season 1 was released on September 26, 2011
- Season 2 was released on November 5, 2012
Germany
- Season 1 was released on May 11, 2012
reception
The series received mostly positive reviews in the United States. On Metacritic, a collective portal for reviews, the series received a Metascore of 71/100. At IMDb , the series received an average rating of 7.5 / 10 with almost 35,000 votes. The series has been praised for its realistic view of the middle class, for example Robert Bianco of USA Today writes:
"... This series seems to more assuredly offer a first-class version of what so many viewers say they want: a humorous, heartfelt, realistic look at middle-class, middle-America family life."
"The series seems to be a prime version of what so many viewers want: a humorous, heartfelt look at the life of a middle-class family."
In 2011 the series received the Gracie Award in the Outstanding Comedy category .
Web links
- The Middle in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official website of ABC (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Christian Junklewitz: The Middle: ZDFneo brings the series to Germany . Serienjunkies.de . October 27, 2011. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
- ↑ Broadcast dates of the series The Middle . fernsehserien.de, accessed on October 4, 2014 .
- ↑ Nellie Andreeva: 'The Middle' Renewed For Season 9 By ABC, Cast Set To Return . In: Deadline Hollywood . January 25, 2017. Retrieved January 25, 2017.
- ↑ Tim Krüger: The Middle: Family series ends with season 9 . In: serienjunkies.de . August 2, 2017. Retrieved August 2, 2017.
- ^ The Middle. In: synchronkartei.de. German synchronous index , accessed on September 21, 2012 .
- ^ Robert Seidman: ABC gives full season pickups to "Modern Family", "Cougar Town," and "The Middle" . TV By the Numbers . October 8, 2009. Retrieved April 29, 2010.
- ↑ Bernd Michael Krannich: ABC extends "Modern Family", "Cougar Town", "The Middle" . Serial junkies . January 13, 2010. Retrieved on April 29, 2010. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Christian Junklewitz: ABC extends six series for the 2011/2012 season . In: Serienjunkies.de . January 10, 2011. Retrieved January 11, 2011.
- ^ Rainer Idesheim: The Middle: ABC extends comedy series by 4th season . In: Serienjunkies.de . May 11, 2012. Retrieved May 11, 2012.
- ^ Christian Junklewitz: The Middle: ZDFneo brings the series to Germany . Serienjunkies.de . October 27, 2011. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
- ↑ Michael Brandes: zdf_neo takes "The Middle" into the evening program . Wishlist.de . January 18, 2012. Retrieved January 18, 2012.
- ↑ Michael Brandes: "The Middle": Third season on a new slot . In: Wishlist.de . June 11, 2012. Retrieved June 11, 2012.
- ↑ Markus Ruoff: "The Expert: August 25, 2014. In: quotenmeter.de . August 25, 2014. Accessed on August 26, 2014.
- ↑ Manuel Weis: "The Middle" leaves ZDFneo . Oddsmeter.de . November 23, 2015. Accessed April 27, 2018.
- ^ The Middle. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. TV Movie, January 2, 2016, accessed December 30, 2015.
- ↑ The Middle on Metacritic.com
- ↑ As of March 2017
- ^ Robert Bianco: These TV series are back, but are they better than ever? . USA Today . June 10, 2010. Retrieved November 25, 2011.
- ^ Gracie Awards 2011
