Neil Flynn and Patricia Heaton
Sacred Heart's resident janitor is scrubbing into a new role. Scrubs star Neil Flynn has been tapped to play Patricia Heaton's husband in ABC's sitcom pilot, The Middle, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
The family comedy will focus on Flynn's and Heaton's middle-class characters struggling to
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Patricia Heaton by Jean-Paul Aussenard/ WireImage.com
The Middle, an ABC pilot which was (unsuccesfully) developed for the 2006-07 TV season and then starred Ricki Lake, has been given new life. According to the Reporter, the Alphabet network has awarded the comedy (about a middle-class Midwestern family) a pick-up, provided that Patricia Heaton is landed as the lead.CBS' Two and a Half Men went through a similar process, when its pilot was picked up contingent upon Charlie Sheen joining the cast.Should producer Warner Bros. sign Raymond's wife, she would potentially reunite at ABC with Back to You bud Kelsey Grammer, who's headlining the pilot Roman's Empire. — Matt Mitovich
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Patricia Heaton and Kelsey Grammer in Back to You by Sam Jones/Fox
Having sitcom stalwarts Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton in starring roles wasn't enough for Fox to bring Back to You back to you, the viewer, for a second season. "This was not an easy decision," said Fox Entertainment chief Kevin Reilly. "But with that kind of top-profile talent and...proximity to [American Idol] in the second half of the season, the expectations were higher."Reilly emphasized Fox is working to develop a live-action comedy franchise, but Back To You didn't seem to fit that bill. "The show did not seem to be strking a chord, and in terms of creative direction...it was a pretty mixed bag," he said. The show did go down with a fight. It got off to a strong start when it debuted last fall, attracting more than nine million viewers. Two episodes that followed Idol in April each brought in more than 12 million sets of eyeballs. While that's respectable — it won its timeslot on those two occasions, in terms of viewers and the highly coveted adult 18-49 group —...
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Patricia Heaton by Sam Jones/Fox
Sure Kelsey Grammer is worth his weight in sitcom gold but Back to You Wednesdays at 830 pmET Fox relies as much on the ballast of Patricia Heatons caustic Kelly Carr as it does on his pompous anchor Chuck Darling The former Everybody Loves Raymond star explained why she doesnt live in her old shows shadow GJ Donnelly TV Guide Whats in store for Kelly and ChuckPatricia Heaton Generally their relationship and whether they should reveal that hes Gracies father will come to a head The pressures on Chuck to get over his Peter Pan complexTV Guide Kellys like Moe Howard in the way she keeps everybody in line Heaton [Laughs] Thats a great metaphor Debra Barone was like that But Kelly is allowed her craziness tooTV Guide Whats it like playing off Kelsey Heaton Its like flint We spark off each other Its different than with Ray Romano whose character was more hangdogTV Guide And no
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Patricia Heaton, Back to You
Sure, Kelsey Grammer is worth his weight in sitcom gold, but Back to You (Wednesdays at 8:30 pm/ET, Fox) relies as much on the ballast of Patricia Heaton’s caustic Kelly Carr as it does on Grammer's pompous anchor Chuck Darling. The former Everybody Loves Raymond star explained why she doesn’t live in her old show’s shadow.
TV Guide: What’s in store for Kelly and Chuck?Patricia Heaton: Generally, their relationship, and whether they should reveal that he’s Gracie’s father, will come to a head. The pressure’s on Chuck to get over his Peter Pan complex.
TV Guide: Kelly’s like Moe Howard in the way she keeps everybody in line. Heaton: [Laughs] That’s a great metaphor! Debra Barone was like that. But Kelly is allo
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The good folks at WURG sure know their slapstick. It's been quite some time since I've seen good physical comedy on television, so what a thrill to see it make a comeback. Good slapstick, good slapstick. Now let's get to the better banter.I'm not sure we've had an episode yet that puts the whole crew in one situation, so this week was a change of pace. Little Gracie's 11th-birthday party was basically over before it started, because the only one of the six adults there who had steeled herself to find and catch the raccoon in the attic was Kelly, and Chuck wasn't about to let her do it. I understood his reasoning (Kelly's done everything for Gracie and Chuck wants to contribute, even if she doesn’t know he's her father), but that part felt a little far-fetched. Chuck strikes me as the kind who'll let anyone take a fall for him — in poor Ryan's case, quite literally — even Kelly, so why take a stand on this thing that he was obviously scared of?Either way, the guys on t...
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There is nothing more terrifying than having your 10-year-old classmates meet one (or both) of your parents, and I know this from experience. I felt for poor Gracie Carr, who so obviously wanted both her bully and her mother to disappear from this class trip to the station. She was probably thinking that the only upside was not having to have class.If only Kelly and Chuck knew that they were probably just making the situation worse for their daughter by wanting to confront the bully, whether through a "conflict resolution" session or the terrifying way that Kelly ended up going about it. (I'm well out of elementary school, but if tomorrow Patricia Heaton said to me, "I will come into your room while you are sleeping and I will rip your head off," I would probably faint.) As soon as Xander Tucker gets over his fear of Kelly, he's going to start bullying Gracie sevenfold. Perhaps by then Chuck will no longer be blinded by Xander's gorgeous, divorced mother and will actually be able to...
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Is it 1994? I think it must be, because lately Tia Carrere is popping up everywhere — well, if not everywhere, at least on two shows I cover, and I only cover three, so if she shows up on Friday Night Lights, I know something's up. Between her hanging out with Larry David (cocreator of Seinfeld, coincidentally on in 1994) and Kelsey Grammer (Frasier, also on in 1994) in recent weeks, I just have to wonder if I've been witness to a time warp. She did a cute job tonight, playing a woman — not a hooker, apparently — who almost managed to seduce Chuck, so it's a shame she was rather underutilized.Of course, had she actually managed to "take a ride on the Chuck wagon," as Montana so delicately put it, we wouldn't have been able to see that Chuck is, at heart, a decent guy. Sure, he only took Ryan out to dinner to prove to Kelly that he didn't donate the rude gene to Gracie, and yes, he did repeatedly try to hurry up and ditch this dinner to be with Carrere's unnamed hottie...
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Well, I'll say one thing: This is the first time in recent memory I've heard the phrase, "Recorded in front of a live studio audience" outside of a 20-year-old rerun. In fact, it made me think I was too hard on last week's episode. It's a retro show in its own way, and perhaps I needed that jolt of perspective that Kelsey Grammer's little intro gave me.The newsroom of WURG certainly was all a-twitter this week. After Chuck overheard some network brass (who were in Pittsburgh for a program at Carnegie Mellon on "The changing face of network news") talking about how he's gone from one of the biggest markets in the country to being Kelly's sidekick — even going so far as to say, "I'd put a gun to my head" — Chuck decides to take the lead story for the day's news: A family that went missing while camping was finally found. To say he steals it out from under Kelly's nose wouldn't even be an overstatement, and he leaves her with the less enviable, "Building on fire!" headline....
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Clunk. That's the sound this episode made as it hit the air. You may be wondering how a show could make a physical clunk sound, but (and imagine some dramatic flare here) they found a way! It's almost as if after last week's great momentum, the powers that be decided that they didn't want to give us too much funny too fast, and so they churned out an awkwardly paced and plotted car boot of an episode.On the upside, Fred Willard's Marsh was on fire tonight, and doing his proprietary shtick that I've loved since Best in Show. From his opening where, after reporting that Jason Shaw, a Steeler, was dating a supermodel, and exclaiming, "Now that's one person I'd like to trade places with for three hours," only to insist on explaining that he meant he wanted to exchange the football player, and very emphatically not the supermodel, I knew he was back in fine form. In fact, Marsh and Gary's shared scenes were, to borrow a term, "the adorablest," of the episode. Gary's robotic delivery in r...
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