Playing the Economy for Laughs

ABC Comedy Wednesday is 3 for 4 in the success department. Kelsey Grammer’s inane Hank doesn’t make the grade, but you can add The Middle (Wednesdays, 8:30pm) to Modern Family and Cougar Town as solid examples of what has become a stronger year for comedy than we’ve seen in some time.

The "middle" in the title refers to the middle of the country—Orson, Indiana—which, for this cast of characters is also the middle of nowhere. Everybody Loves Raymond’s Patricia Heaton plays Frankie Heck, a frazzled mother trying to hold things together as the economy wreaks havoc on her family. Frankie is a salesperson barely hanging on to her job at a used car lot, where she uses test drives to take care of personal business and has a negative sales record (in the pilot, one of those test drives resulted in a theft). Husband Mike (Scrubs’s nameless janitor Neil Flynn) is a quarry manager who believes that the best thing he can do for his kids is to be completely honest with them, even if that means their self-esteem takes a blow as a result. And what of the kids? There’s sarcastic son Axl (Charlie McDermott), awkward daughter Sue (Eden Sher), and just plain weird youngest son Brick (Atticus Shaffer). Shaffer is a real find, capable of stealing a scene from Heaton and Flynn with nothing more than a whisper (he repeats words softly to himself as a soothing mechanism). He’s far from the only thing that works in The Middle, unfortunately titled since comparisons to Malcolm in the Middle are inevitable. But this is no mere copycat sitcom. Where Malcolm got by on having the entire family yell at each other for seven seasons, The Middle is much more subtle, letting its familial hardships be known without having to resort to ugliness at every turn.

There’s nothing but ugliness, however, in Hank (Wednesdays, 8pm), another new comedy that uses the economic crisis at its jumping-off point. Kelsey Grammer is Hank Pryor, a victim of corporate downsizing who is forced to pull his family away from their cushy New York lifestyle to return to his more affordable Virginia roots. Naturally, nobody wants to be there, with the exception of son Henry, who “cannot wait to go to the bathroom here.” If that inexplicable joke makes you laugh, please enjoy Hank. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for even a whiff of the sophistication that defined Frasier, you’re in for a very long half-hour. Not even Grammer’s expertise with a punchline is enough to make these particular punchlines funny, and support from Melinda McGraw as wife Tilly and Anchorman’s David Koechner as brother-in-law Grady can’t do anything to improve matters. ABC has better comedy prospects waiting in the wings (the Scrubs reboot, Better Off Ted), so it probably won’t be too long before Hank itself is downsized.