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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“But the show is not so much about the bad economy,” says Heaton. “It’s about the American attitude of resilience, and trying to find a new way to do things and put a positive spin on it.”

“It’s from the mom’s point of view, and it’s not with a bumbling dad who can never do anything right [compared to "Everybody Loves Raymond"],” 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.”

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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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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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• 5 reviews of Patricia Heaton (rateitall.com)

If you’re wondering what she wants on Dec. 25, her wish list is short: “world peace and champagne.” And never mind the candy canes and Hershey kisses, said Heaton, 51, the mother of four sons. She wants to find something much sweeter in her stocking.

“Candy? I want jewelry, honey.”

What holiday heirlooms do you have?

We actually have my family’s original manger set. We had to replace the figures that got lost and broken over the years. When I was little, my sister Fran and I would play with the figures like it was a doll house. A doll house with sheep and cows. And Wise Men. A pretty weird doll house when you think of it.

What Christmas traditions do you keep now with your husband and children?

My husband, David Hunt, has brought more traditions to our family than I have since he is British. We do Boxing Day with paper crowns and paper crackers that explode and figgy pudding and Yorkshire pudding.

Give us a Bay Village winter memory.

In Bay Village, we always went sledding at the hills around Huntington Beach until our hands and feet were frozen stiff.

Everything was so DIY in those days. And completely unsafe. If somebody didn’t sled into a tree and crack their head open, well, it just wasn’t a special outing. When I was older, it was skating at Winterhurst in Lakewood, where the boys and girls went to meet and skate. It was all so thrilling.

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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Patricia Heaton was chosen as part of TV Squad eight wonderful stars shining in the TV pantheon for 2009:

8. Patricia Heaton. I wasn’t expecting to see Patricia Heaton being anything other than Deborah on Everybody Loves Raymond. Instead, as Francis Heck on The Middle, she’s a completely different person. That, my friends, is why she’s a great actress. Superficially, a housewife, mother of three, would seem to be a stereotype, but not when Patricia’s interpreting the role. She’s been a revelation on The Middle.

Maybe next year?

Source: The Wrap

ABC’s The Middle
Yes, I’m surprised to be including this in my list, but I’ve come to look forward to this little Patricia Heaton sitcom. It doesn’t have the hype of other shows, but there’s something very loving and endearing about this dysfunctional, middle American tableau. It’s kind of wholesome, kind of normal, kind of old fashioned. I kind of love it.