If you don't know the name Javier Grillo-Marxuach, you've definitely seen his work in the past few years. Not only was Grillo-Marxuach one of the main creative forces on ABC's gargantuan hit LOST during its first two seasons, serving as writer and producer, Javier was also a writer on Charmed, Law & Order: SVU, Boomtown, SeaQuest, and both co-executive producer and writer on NBC's Medium. In addition to his TV work, Grillo-Marxuach also ventured into the comic book world with Marvel Comics where he wrote Annihilation - Super-Skrull before teaming up with Dynamite Entertainment to pen the four-issue series Classic Battlestar Galactica: Cylon Apocalypse

Now Javier Grillo-Marxuach is returning to TV as executive producer, creator, and writer of the upcoming ABC Family series The Middleman, about a struggling artist who gets recruited by a secret agency to battle the forces of evil. A project he originally got off the ground as a comic book with Viper Comics and with help from popular geek friendly comic book scribe and animated producer Paul Dini (Star Wars: Ewoks, Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League and Justice League Unlimited), The Middleman makes its debut on ABC Family on June 16 at 8pm.

Last week, The Deadbolt had the good fortune to catch up with Javier on a conference call with a few other select outlets to learn more about The Middleman, his original vision, how it finally found its way to TV, his time spent on LOST, and how it was originally conceived in the Joss Whedon/Buffy era.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach on his world view in relation to writing Middleman:

"When I first wrote this pilot, I was trying to define my own voice as a writer. And I had worked on a number of shows at that point. I mean, I wrote this pilot in ’98, I was on Charmed, I had worked on SeaQuest and The Pretender and a few other series. I was really trying to define myself, and a lot of the dialogue and stability for this thing came out of that effort more than anything else.

"There’s a combination of weirdness, but also kind of earnestness to the show. The show is very unabashed and it’s very much what it is and the characters don’t really apologize for being who they are, and they talk the way they talk because that’s the way that I would like reality to be. So it’s really about those two qualities, this sort of earnestness and weirdness, and if I were to throw a third one in it would be optimism, that I think make up what the show is about.

"If you asked what the Javi-centric worldview is, it’s pretty much about that. I think, tonally, Middleman is different from a lot of science fiction shows that exist today because it is so lighthearted and it is so optimistic, rather than being as tragic as so many shows are right now."

Grillo-Marxuach on the changes he had to make to characters and story for television:

"What’s interesting is that the Viper comic book series is based on a pilot that I wrote in ’98 or ’99. Really, the comic book followed the idea to make it a TV series. So if you’ve read the comic book and you look at the pilot, you’ll notice that the pilot is tremendously true to the comic book and the comic book was written from the pilot script that I wrote originally. There’s not a lot of difference.

"I mean, there are a couple of things we did. Like, for example, when I wrote the pilot back in ’98 and ’99 it was Wendy and her peer group were a little more Gen-X in terms of their attitude. I was still dangerously close to my years of slackerdom and school and all that, so I think the characters had a little bit more of that attitude. One of the notes that came from ABC Family when they bought the pilot was that they really wanted the characters to have more of a millennial sensibility, which makes sense because it’s been ten years since I wrote the thing.

"So I think in updating the characters to sort of be more like today’s 21, 22-year-olds, as opposed to the ones from my experience, the biggest change is that the character of Lacy became, you know, she was always a confrontational spoken-word performance artist and she was always going to be somebody who took up causes and all that, but we really focused that into sort of a political agenda that her art is really art that is politically active and engaged and it’s about environmental causes and things like that. And that really came from the network; the network wanted Lacy to be engaged that way, because that’s the truth about this generation that is not necessarily true of mine. So that’s a huge change in terms of the character. And it’s really the only major character adjustment that we made from the comic book."

On why the timing is right for Middleman now as compared to a few years ago:

"I think I’ve changed. And I don’t mean that to sound as horrifically narcissistic as it does, but when I first wrote this pilot I was, I think, executive story editor on a show. And, to sell a pilot and to run a show and to do it well and to sort of stick true to one individual vision and all that, you need to have a certain amount of experience and you need to have a certain amount of seasoning in the world. Because even in a place as wonderful and nurturing as ABC Family has been to me, it’s still a pretty dense thicket to see a show through.

"What I’ve been through since has been just a tremendous amount of formative experiences that have sort of educated me in how to run a show. So there’s that. I think it was the right time for me to come in and actually be able to be the show runner on this thing without having to give up things that I wouldn’t have wanted to.

"The other thing is that I don’t think that there are still shows out there that are similar to this. Obviously you’ve got Smallville and you’ve got Dr. Who on the SciFi Channel and things like that. But I think that where this show and sort of the sensibility of ABC Family have dovetailed very well is I think ABC Family is trying very hard to create themselves as a network that has smart, very individual shows that represent a certain point of view. And I think there was a very good confluence of this show and that point of view."

Fighting Evil Forces with The Middleman's Javier Grillo-Marxuach Page 2