TWoP: When you originally decided to adapt the Middleman idea into a comic, were you hoping that would help your chances to get it made into a show, or were you hoping to get the story in whatever medium possible?
Javier Grillo-Marxuach: In 2004 I was working on Lost, and I had a pretty good idea that the show was going to be huge. Middleman was just about me and trying to get this little project out that I really loved, finding an artist in Les McClaine who was really into it and understood it and wanted to do it, and finding a company in Viper Comics that would [publish] it. I had the script; the script had been finished since 1998, and the script for the pilot is the exact same as the script for the comic book, it's the same script that we produced as the pilot. Literally, there is a range of about 10 percent variance between each of the different versions, so we're really talking about a very pure transition from my original idea to comics to film. Which is kind of a fairy story in itself, sort of like a fairy tale ending to this thing, because usually there's a lot of compromise and a lot of lateral change. So the comic book for me was satisfaction enough, and everything else has been kind of gravy... and pretty good gravy, too, like rich and brown. "This is good!" [Laughs.]

I love the comic book, but were you surprised the show ended up on ABC Family? Have you always seen it as a family-friendly show?
Grillo-Marxuach: The show has a very awesome set of core values, it's an optimistic show. It's not dark. It's really about how heroism doesn't have to destroy your life, which I think is an overwhelming theme of a lot of genre in the '90s and early 2000s, because we were living in pretty dark times. In that case, it does have a kind of value to it that's congruent with what ABC Family is doing, but the thing you have to understand about what ABC Family is doing is they've also been trying to develop into what the WB was in the mid-'90s -- the WB of Buffy, Dawson's Creek, and all that. The shows that have alternative family values, that are about strong core units, but really don't fit that kind of treacly mold of what everybody thinks that network is. So, Kate Juergens, who was the senior VP of the network and brought the show to the network, had worked at the WB, and she's somebody I'd known for a while, and I think that we understood and the network understood that the show had core values that were really positive, even though it's not necessarily a show about a "family." The weird thing is, people keep asking me, "Was ABC Family the right network for the show?" And I keep saying, "Of course it was -- they let me do it!" [Laughs.] And they let me do it exactly how I wanted to do it. They never questioned things like the talking monkeys, the vampire ventriloquist dummies and the flying fish. Their biggest concerns were always, "Is Wendy a solid character who the audience can identify with? Is she having believable conflicts with her friends and her family and all of that?" That was a fantastic thing to do. Was it a surprise? I might have thought it would have been SyFy or something, but at the same time, the more pleasant of all surprises was that I found any network that bought into the show's really weird, niche, idiosyncratic vision, you know?

Were there ever any concerns about content? You have fun with the swearing, but there are some dark corners of some of the episodes.
Grillo-Marxuach: You have the occasional conversation with the standards and practices people about whether you're going too far or not far enough. I think that the best example of that is the episode with the boy band and the wormholes. There's a line where the Middleman says, "We have to stop Cindy before she sucks that band through a hole... in space." There was a lot of discussion about making sure the wormhole didn't look too rectal, that the butt of the duck didn't have rectum in it, that the show didn't have an overwhelming sense of rectalism. [Laughs.] And that was our most colorful conversation with the network about content. But frankly, the show has a good heart. It's a happy show. It's more daffy than snarky, anyway. And I think we all were in on the joke. Even the profanity. Did we have it? Yeah, but it was bleeped out, and the weird thing is, when people watch the show, sometimes the profanities that they invent in their heads are actually much worse than anything that was spoken. With that black bar, you can't tell what people are mouthing, so people just sort of fill it in with whatever they think the profanity should be, and it's usually far worse than anything we came up with.

Some of the effects in the show look pretty impressive, but I'm sure they were done on fairly small budget. Did you ever have to reject anything for budget reasons?
Grillo-Marxuach: Actually, the 13th episode is coming out as a comic book, and it was ultimately a budget question whether to stop production where we did. But the nice thing about the comic book is that I can have these sort of Fatboy stormtroopers that look like the Burger King, with the Fatboy head, riding armored kangaroos who shoot missiles out of their mouths and stuff like that. So I get to do that, and I couldn't do that on TV, so I guess I'm kind of happy that we ultimately wound up in a comic book world for that, because the finale can be as grand as we want it to be. But when we went to ABC Family, we knew that we would have a very small budget for the show. The show's budget was about $1.5 million, which pretty much is the cost of craft services on Lost. It literally is between a half and a third of the budget of a show like Heroes or any big-ticket network sci-fi show. And we approached it instead of going, "Well, let's come up with stuff that's too big," we approached it as, "This is a show that has a limited budget, let's tailor our stories to what we can do rather than what we can't do." And ironically, because we have such a great effects team -- there's a guy named Steve Lebed -- Steve and his company Mechnology were so creative and so resourceful and so dedicated, they pretty much gave us everything we wanted. Often, it was more the physical effects, because we have seven days to shoot each episode -- most network shows have eight days -- and we didn't really have a lot of overtime for budget reasons. You know, there was one episode where we wanted the HADAR to come off its moorings and kind of chase us down the hall like the boulder from Indiana Jones So it was actually stuff like that that was harder to do, because once we gave it to Steve, he and his team made sure we got everything we needed. But it was what we couldn't do physically on the set that was often a limiting factor more than anything else.

Had you always seen romance playing such a big part in the series? Was that a natural progression for the story, or a conscious attempt to attract a wider audience on the network?
Grillo-Marxuach: It was a natural development. You know, when you're dealing with character relationships, you ultimately have to go there, and to be honest with you, the one thing that I fought tooth and nail was the Middleman and Lacey. The writers all felt that we needed to go there, we needed to develop it, and it was one of those weird things where I was a showrunner pitted against my own staff. I thought that it was inappropriate -- he was older, he's Wendy's boss, he's an authority figure, and I kind of have a thing about that, you know? But ultimately, and this is the way that I try to manage a show that I run, is to really trust the people that I hired to steer me in the right direction. You know, I'm not a megalomaniacal showrunner who's got everything planned out and all that. I really trust the people whom I work with, and we all work together to make the show the best we can. And they really steered me in that direction. They wanted it, they felt that it was appropriate and doable, and together we kinda found the best way to steer that, and that story comes to a climax in the graphic novel. But we found a way to keep it not creepy and really true to the spirit of the characters. I originally thought we couldn't do it, and I was thankfully proven wrong. And Tyler, -- here's the thing, you've got to have romance in a show. I mean, we wanted the show to pass the Bechdel test, we wanted to show that the girls weren't boy-crazy all the time, they weren't always arguing about boys and all that, but love is a part of life, you know? So we ultimately have to get into that, what can you do?

You had some pretty great guest stars on the show. Who were your favorites?
Grillo-Marxuach: Kevin Sorbo was amazing, and literally, to be able to pay to have him on the show, we had a big sequence set on a submarine I had to cut. So we kind of traded the set to be able to get him on the show. And it was worth every penny. He was a pro, a gentleman, a guy who just comes on the set and you can tell that the guy is huge, you know? And he brought so much to that part, the Middleman from the 1960s, I was really delighted to have him. I was delighted to have Mark Sheppard play the arc as Manservant Neville. The character in the comic is a very different Manservant Neville, but he was actually based on Mark, so the gorilla suit-wearing, Tommy gun-wielding Manservant Neville from the comic book was supposed to be Mark Sheppard. I try to put him in everything I do, because I just love working with him, so that was really awesome. Elaine Hendricks I worked with on The Chronicle, and it was great to have her as Roxy Wasserman. We have these great casting people who work with Joss Whedon on all of his shows, and they just brought us all these great people across the board. And lest we forget, Mary Lynn Rajskub as the evil gorilla-wrangling Dr. Gibbs in the pilot. I think she was kind of freaked out because I was such a fanboy for her and for Chloe (on 24) and the whole thing. We' were pretty much in "dream come true" territory for me for most of the show, you've got to understand.

I was excited to see Mark Dacascos as Sensei Ping, the luchadore-mask-wearing martial arts master.
Grillo-Marxuach: Oh God, how great was he! I forgot! You know, he was the nicest -- you know how people who can kill you just by looking at you and winking their eye the right way because they're so fucking great at martial arts are so mellow and nice? He's got nothing to worry about. That' guys got nothing to prove. And he was so nice. He was a wonderful guy to work with, and I wish I could have brought Sensei Ping back. The other thing, in addition to him just being a wonderful person, he was hysterically funny, playing a satirical take on a stereotypical type of character that I'm sure he's encountered a billion times in his life as a performer. When you think of Mark Dacascos, you think of the action and you think of the martial arts, but you don't think he can be funny, and he was hysterically funny.

So do you have more Middleman stories to tell?
Grillo-Marxuach: The [series finale] comic book, The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, is a natural endpoint for the saga of the Middleman as seen on the TV show, and leaves no questions unanswered except for who's Wendy's father. So you can look at the 12 episodes and the last, unfilmed script that's now a graphic novel, and you can say that's a complete story. On the other hand, I've been working on this for the better part of 12 years now, so I've certainly learned to never say die with the Middleman. If the DVD sells well, and there's a demand for it, we're not gonna say no. And I'm gonna go work on Day One, which is Jesse Alexander's new show for NBC, starting in August. So I'm certainly moving on and learnign from some really gifted people,. But it's one of those thngs that, if the word is there that the world wants more Middleman, I'm happy to do it. It's a joyous thing.

What can you tell us about Day One?
Grillo-Marxuach: It's created by Jesse Alexander, who worked on Heroes and on Alias -- and Lost, I actually worked with him on Lost. And I'm on the creative team, there's me, there's Jesse, there's Jeph Loeb, who was also on Heroes and Lost, this guy Erik Oleson, who wrote on Kings and Jack and Bobby and a bunch of other great shows. And it's just gonna be a nice group of people doing a kind of next-generation action-adventure-thriller type show with some sci-fi elements. I think it's gonna be an awesome, awesome thing to do, and I'm pretty excited about it.

Pick up your copy of the complete Middleman DVD collection here, and get the series finale in comic-book form here!