Then there are the Heck kids.

Axl, portrayed by Charlie McDermott (Frozen River), is the teenage son, a jockey, semi-nudist (seriously) and often rebel who occasionally has a soft spot; Eden Sher (Weeds) plays the socially awkward teenage daughter Sue who has tried out for every sport and extracurricular at school known to man without ever being accepted into any of them; and Atticus Shaffer (The Unborn) plays Brick, the bookwork and youngest child who often whispers to himself and considers his backpack his best friend. Oh yeah.

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Of course, much is changed on “The Middle,” her freshman ABC domestic comedy, after “Everybody Loves Raymond,” where for nine hit seasons she played a frazzled hausfrau opposite Ray Romano.

“It’s not normally a great choice, to repeat yourself,” says Heaton, acknowledging her knee-jerk reluctance to go home again, sitcom-wise.

But “The Middle,” which airs Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. EST, offered her a different place to settle.

“It’s from the mom’s point of view, and it’s not with a bumbling dad who can never do anything right,” she says. “It’s about trying to keep the marriage lively and raise the kids right, but not having enough time and energy to do any of those things.”

It’s also far removed from the Barones’ testy Long Island homestead.

“The Middle” – presided over by its middle-class, nearing-midlife couple, the Hecks – is rooted firmly in the Midwest. There, home is more loving and hopeful than on “Raymond,” if no less challenging, frantic and funny.

And frumpy. At 51, Heaton is a looker, but as pushed-to-the-limit housewife Frankie, she looks authentically dressed down.

“The plainer I am, the better,” says Heaton. “I have these bangs that I clip on. The bangs are the last thing to go on. Then, I can really do the character.”

In their small Indiana town, husband Mike (Neil Flynn) is a manager at a local quarry while Frankie supplements her household duties by trying to sell cars at the town’s lone, struggling auto dealership. Adding to the mix are their kids: sullen high-school jock Axl (Charlie McDermott), insecure preteen wallflower Sue (Eden Shur) and quirky, brilliant 8-year-old Brick (Atticus Shaffer).

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Malavika: To be honest, family-centric sitcoms always made me a bit uncomfortable. As much as I loved “The Cosby Show” and, yes, even “Growing Pains,” I grew out of that phase pretty quickly. If I wanted to laugh at someone’s family, well, I’d laugh at my own. So, I was pretty surprised at how much I liked “The Middle.” Patricia Heaton has always been good at playing the harried mom type and Neil Flynn pretty much shines in anything he does. But, truly, it’s their kooky kids — teenage son Axl, almost always wandering the house in nothing but boxers; the eager but perennial failure at whatever she does Susan; and the totally weird youngest child Brick — that pushes this past “Malcolm in the Middle” territory.

Adam: I totally agree. The Hecks are the most realistic, relatable family on TV right now; in fact, I’m having trouble thinking of any family in all of TV history that could give them a run for their money.

“The Middle” has obvious forebearers, like “Malcolm in the Middle,” as you mentioned (although it is thankfully far less wacky), but especially the mother of all blue-collar comedies, “Roseanne.” Whereas that undoubtedly classic sitcom served as a showcase for Roseanne Barr’s standup routines, with her children little more than window dressing, “The Middle” is much more of an ensemble effort. Heaton is obviously the main character, but unlike Roseanne, she doesn’t get the lion’s share of laughs. In other words, she doesn’t sit around the kitchen all day spitting wisecracks; on the contrary, Frankie Heck is almost constantly in motion, running from one family emergency to the next, and that’s where the humor is derived from. That’s what we can all relate to.

The Middle doesn’t get a lot of attention, but we’d like to change that, now that we’ve hit the middle of The Middle’s first season.

So if you like to laugh, really, you should check out The Middle, which stars Patricia Heaton and airs Wednesdays on ABC and A.

The Middle isn’t hip and edgy, like Modern Family.

The Middle isn’t rife with sophomoric sexual situations, like Cougar Town.

But that doesn’t mean The Middle is bland, which often is the quick conclusion when hearing the term “family comedy.”

Yes, The Middle focuses on an Indiana family: Mom Frankie Heck (Heaton), dad Mike (Neil Flynn) and kids Axl (Charlie McDermott), Sue (Eden Sher) and Brick (Atticus Shaffer).

But The Middle is surprisingly cynical in its portrayal of an average clan living in “the middle” of the United States.

Heaton is a TV-comedy veteran from her nine seasons as Debra Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond. In fact, Heaton probably can watch reruns of herself 50 times a day if she just clicks around.

“That’s all I’ve been doing for years, sitting in front of the TV, watching old reruns, crying and eating ice cream,” said Heaton, 51.

That’s not true, of course. Last season Heaton was part of a much-publicized but hastily cancelled sitcom with Kelsey Grammer called Back to You.

Heaton seems much more comfortable playing underpaid, overworked and overwhelmed matriarch Frankie Heck. And the great side-benefit of The Middle is that all three of Frankie’s kids are funny in their own right.

Axl is a teenage boy who has entered the stage where everything is “lame.” Sue’s enthusiasm is infectious even though she fails horribly at everything she tries.

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7. The Middle. A lot of people will pick Modern Family over this, but I think The Middle is funnier and isn’t tired up by a faux-documentary style. Patricia Heaton and Neil Flynn are great and so are all the kids.

Yet we’re now finishing a television year that has seen both the emergence of ABC’s uproarious “Modern Family” and its less dazzling but wonderfully mordant lead-in, “The Middle,” about another kind of modern family—a brew of consistent charm and character with a bracing hint of nightmarish reality underlying its sitcom fun. Add to these the most unexpected gem of all—NBC’s “Community,” a satire set in the unlikely precincts of a community college. Its creator, Dan Harmon, was, by his own account, inspired by the semester he once spent at one in pursuit of an effort to strengthen ties with his girlfriend. That relationship didn’t work out in the end, but, happily, the same can’t be said of this whip-smart series about an improbably compelling band of adults taking classes at a sunny academic hell called Greendale Community College.

These were comedies that lit out for new territory and that delivered, at least, persuasive approximations thereof. Of none was this truer than that creation of old “Frasier” hands Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, “Modern Family”—a hugely ambitious, hilarious and royally self-assured enterprise involving three family-connected couples. So seductive are each of these portraits, it’s become clear as the series runs on, that the show’s only problem is finding a way to fit all of them, and their delectable situations, into a satisfying share of what is, after all, only a half-hour format.

No such problems confront “The Middle.” The title refers to the setting—the country’s middle—for this series about a family consigned, economically speaking, to life on the margins. Patricia Heaton plays the redoubtable Frankie—Indiana homemaker, auto salesperson still looking for her first car sale, mother of three, wife to the jovial Mike—all of it stellar material for Ms. Heaton, and a vast improvement over her role as the endlessly disaffected wife, and scold, in “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Here she’s a dynamo of enterprise, and fixing, who confronts the hard-pressed life as the norm, serves fast-food dinners on paper plates, and is inspired, regularly, to try something new like getting the family members to eat dinner together around the table instead of in front of their TV sets—a proposal the children consider akin to a violation of natural law. A brash, broadly drawn character, Frankie becomes in Ms. Heaton’s delicately nuanced performance a perfectly credible one—and one with well-honed comedy reflexes, which count heavily here. For, filled as the show is with caustic commentary—one zinger of an episode focused on a bureaucracy prepared to swing into action and, possibly, remove the strange youngest child, Brick (Atticus Shaffer), to a foster home because he’d decided to wrap a bandage around his arm—the series is, in the end, in the business of inducing laughter, which it does with gratifying regularity.

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The Middle (ABC) – Forgive me if I’m forgetting one, but I don’t think there has been a genuinely funny, down-to-earth, timely broadcast sitcom that dared to focus on a cash-strapped working class American family since Roseanne at its peak. (No, I haven’t spaced on Malcolm in the Middle, a personal favorite of mine. Malcolm was a bit “out there” and made no claim to realism.) So here’s three cheers for the harried Hecks of small-town Indiana: Car-salesperson mom Frankie (Patricia Heaton), quarry manager dad Mike (Neil Flynn), dim teen jock and horn dog Axl (Charlie McDermott), socially awkward outcast Sue (Eden Sher) and bizarre little Brick (Atticus Shaffer, an instant scene-stealer). I hope they stay with us for years.

The next time someone suggests the half-hour sitcom is “dead,” tell them to check out ABC on Wednesday for a glimpse of Modern Family, which I think will give NBC’s overrated 30 Rock a run at the Emmys. Family love and dysfunction have never been this perfectly portrayed, including the comic high point of the series, gay couple Cameron and Mitchell.

As long as you’re watching Modern Family, make it a point to get to ABC at 8:30 p.m. for lead-in The Middle, which is happily reminiscent of recent classic Malcolm in the Middle. Although Patricia Heaton as frustrated mom Frankie is less cantankerous than Jane Kaczmarek as equally frazzled Mom Lois, 11-year-old Atticus Shaffer is the new Dewey. The resemblance is eerie.

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Just like The Big Bang Theory was a breakout hit waiting to happen, I thinkThe Middle is being overshadowed by Modern Family. Maybe a shake-up is just what it needs. Don’t get me wrong, MF is fully deserving of all the praise, just not at the expense of this wonderful little gem tucked right before it.

There was a tragedy this week, though. Sue’s relationship ended. When she was telling Frankie and Mike about it, I was cringing right along with them expecting a much different revelation than two boys hiding out to sneak a smoke. I am so impressed with the abilities of Eden Sher and Atticus Shaffer in this show. Without them, those archetypes would probably fall into parody, but Sher just sells the oblivious innocence of Sue with utter conviction.

Shaffer could have easily turned Brick into that typical “weird” little kid we’ve seen a million times, but he infuses something special in there. Highlights this week were him lying under the Christmas tree, and sucking all the joy out of Santa at the mall. The climax of the episode, though, with Mike waking up the kids to throw themselves together for Frankie’s moment, was priceless. Those are the memories that Holidays are made of, like the family’s appearance at the back of the church in their “best” attire.

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.
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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.
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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.