The housing-loss crisis even hits sitcomworld in "The Middle"

A Tom Toles-style Halloween [click to enlarge]
(See washingtonpost.com's October 2011 Tom Toles gallery.)

"I looked around and realized that a lot of our neighbors were gone. We had hotdogs but no buns, drinks but no cups, macaroni and cheese with no forks."

-- Frankie Heck (Patricia Heaton),
on last week's episode of The Middle

by Ken

As regular viewers of The Middle are well aware, Frankie tends to focus kind of narrowly on the carefully delimited confines of her world there is Orson, Indiana. (Unlike the rest of us, that is, who regularly focus on the Big Picture.) Which perhaps explain how it is that her neighbors have to explain that the missing Menahans weren't "just visiting family." They "got foreclosed on and had to move out in the middle of the night," explains one neighbor, startled that Frankie doesn't know. Another neighbor ventures that the Menahans probably are visiting family now. And ""the Johnsons are on the verge of 'visiting family' too."

One of the especially nice things about Roseanne was that working Americans saw aspects of our lives reflected there which didn't show up much elsewhere in the media. Not only were the Conners and most of their friends and neighbors engaged in a day-in, day-out struggle to keep their heads above water, but when times got tough in real life, they did in Lanford, Illinois, too.

The Roseanne heritage has always been clear enough in The Middle, even if the edge is considerably softer. We've grown accustomed to the Hecks' basic economic reality, where the combined paychecks of Frankie (Patricia Heaton) and and Mike (Neil Flynn) just barely keeps the family going in the corner-cutting lifestyle they've become accustomed to. But in last week's episode, "Bad Choices" (which you can watch online here), the arrival of rain sent the family scurrying --



Now I suppose the writers were sort of romancing when, as the episode developed, it developed that, faced with the cost of necessary repairs like a new roof, the Hecks would actually save money by walking away from their still-unpaid-for house and moving instead into a dream three-bedroom condo. I don't think the Roseanne people would have tried to get away with a premise that silly, but there was still more grounding in reality here than we've grown accustomed to in prime time.

In the end it all worked out, with the Hecks' (remaining) neighbors pitching in to help repair the roof. I think the Roseanne people might have tried to sell us that kind of happy ending, but they would have done a more persuasive job of it. But The Middle has a softer, more fable-like edge, and within those paramaters, well, it was nice to see the current housing crisis at least acknowledged.

And I have to say, Brick's new absorption of Shakespeare was kind of fun too.

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