In the middle

This Thanksgiving I sat down with my family to watch ABC’s “The Middle,” a sitcom about Indiana – only it looked a lot different from the Indiana I know.

The show was sharp and witty, but hidden behind the zingy one-liners was a little condescension.

Take the family’s name, Heck, which sounds just a little too much like “hick,” or the fact that during the pilot episode the IU theme song plays in the background as the dorky daughter unsuccessfully tries out for 12 teams. 

Still, every quirky, dysfunctional family doesn’t have to reflect negatively on the real-life place in which it is set. Patricia Heaton’s other fictional family, the Romanos, didn’t demean Long Islanders or make the statement that everyone in the state of New York has an annoying mother-in-law.

“Everybody Loves Raymond” didn’t claim to be telling the story of all New Yorkers, either.  

“The Middle,” on the other hand, seems to be saying that its fictional family is representative of the entire Midwest. 

The frame for the show’s credits depicts an airplane flying over a cornfield, and Heaton’s character said in the introduction that she’s from the part of the country that the rest of you just fly over. She is claiming that space – the Midwest – as her own, and saying it is a part of her identity.

But can we trust the portrayal of a Hollywood-based production crew?

It turns out that both of the women who wrote the pilot episode for “The Middle,” Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, should have some perspective, because they met each other as freshmen here at IU. Then they transferred to NYU two years later.

I’m glad some of the writers actually lived in Indiana for a while, but it still begs the question – why are people who don’t live in Indiana the ones who are telling all of the stories about us?

The easiest explanation is that if you want to write television shows and movies in this country, you need to live on the coast. But the result is that all of the stories about places other than California or New York feel shallow and processed, because the writers can’t really understand a different place because they have all lived out their adult lives in the same place.

The result is that too often the stories that we see on TV only represent a narrow slice of the country.

And when movies do seldom include other settings, what we are left with are often more like trite caricatures than real, substantive stories.

We need real, genuine writers and thinkers to tell our story – the story of Indiana, of the Midwest. Those of us who have spent real time here need to be the ones telling its stories.

What we need are more Kurt Vonneguts and Scott Russell Sanders and fewer Frankie Hecks.