What: The Middle
When: TV2, last night
You couldn't accuse The Middle of raising expectations it's not going to fulfil.
The middle is middle America - Orson, Indiana, the sort of place which sells itself, if it bothers to sell itself at all, as a place where nothing much happens.
Attractions include being the home of Little
Betty snack cakes, the demolition derby for the homeless, and - Orson's real claim to fame - the world's largest polyurethane cow.
How small-town quirky.
That, depending on your tolerance for quirk, might be some sort of warning.
As might mom Frankie's directions on getting to the middle: "Some people might call this the middle of nowhere. You know, one of the places you fly over on your way on your way from somewhere to somewhere ..."
Frankie (Everybody Loves Raymond's Patricia Heaton) is a mother of three, a useless car sales person, wife to quarry manager Mike who told her on their wedding day that he loved her and, if anything changes, he'll let her know.
Frankie frets about not selling cars, her driver's licence photo, her loser kids. And her hair.
In the way of frazzled moms everywhere, possibly, she touches up her re-growth with a brown felt tip pen. She buys burgers for dinner and says, "I cooked".
The family that eats takeaways together, stays together, so Frankie insists the family sits down for a meal together, in front of Dancing with the Stars.
"Okay. Commercials. We got three minutes to hear about everybody's day."
We get the picture. Her hair is frizzy; she's frazzled; she wears horrible clothes.
And then there are the kids. Son number one is a teenager, so he wanders around the house in his underpants, looking for food.
Middle child, the daughter, is geeky, with braces, and her only talent is for trying out for school activities and never making the team. She finally makes some gag-inducing thing called show choir, as crew.
Predictably, she brings the house down, literally, by causing the cast to topple like rather hefty dominoes.
Nobody said: "She brought the house down." The script is a little better than that.
Mom said: "A busted dryer and now a busted kid. My day was going from bad to worse."
The busted kid is the youngest, Brick, who is as peculiar as his name.
His best friend is his backpack. But he loves his mom. He kept telling her she was his hero.
Aw. But it turned out that he meant she had to dress up as a super hero and turn up to do a turn for his class.
Which is why we saw her in the opening moments on a rural road, in a lumpy super hero suit, climbing a telephone pole in an attempt to get cell phone coverage, after she'd been duped and dumped by a woman she'd taken for a test drive.
This story line also involved a famous Little Betty snack cake, in a, yes, quirky twist.
Brick has a disability, of course. He is "a very quirky child. Maybe clinically quirky, even". That's a reasonable diagnosis for The Middle.
