HOLLYWOOD — Context is all: It’s hard to imagine “The Middleman,” a new ABC Family series, arriving as part of a broadcast network fall season, or doing well there, even though it has much in common with last year’s “Chuck” and “Reaper,” other stories of average folk drafted to fight extraordinary foes.
There is something too light about it, too self-mocking, too narrowly aimed. But it is the sort of show that basic cable was invented for; in that venue, light, self-mocking, silly and narrowly aimed might be seen for the good qualities they are. This is good summer entertainment, like a Saturday B-movie matinee transposed to Sunday-night TV (at 8:30).
The show is based on a comic book that in turn was based on a script written originally as a television pilot by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a producer and writer on “Medium” and “Lost.” He was also a contributor over the years to sci-fi and fantasy shows, including “Jake 2.0,” “The Dead Zone,” “Charmed,” “The Pretender” and “SeaQuest DSV,” which is to say, he has lived with this stuff long enough to want to make fun of it.
Our heroine is Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales), alliteratively named in the tradition of Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Matt Murdock, Billy Batson and Clark Kent. A video-game-playing, comics-reading, deadpan millennial nerd girl — a type in vogue if not yet in Vogue — she paints at night and gets by as a temporary worker in the day, until she is recruited as a sidekick by the Middleman (Matt Keeslar) after he sees her attack a “hentai tentacle monster” with a letter opener.
A square-jawed milk-drinker, exceedingly all-American in the way that spoof heroes often are, the Middleman is also a little dark, as if the clean-cut-ness were a kind of candy coating on a potentially explosive soul. He has no trouble with violence.
Like the comic book, which is studded with nods to the Rutles and the Church of the Subgenius, the TV “Middleman” is pop-culturally allusive. It satirizes the conventions of both comic books and television shows.
The adventuring is balanced with well-executed, 20-something domestic comedy. Brit Morgan plays Lacey, Wendy’s roommate, a self-described “confrontational spoken-word performance artist” and animal activist. Boyfriend Ben (Stephen Sowan) breaks up with her because a teacher in film school tells him there’s not enough pain in his life.
As both the thing and the parody of the thing, it’s in the same class as shows like “Batman” and “Get Smart,” which worked both as comedies and, if you were young or willing enough, as adventures.
