The Middle

In Plain Sight was pretty depressing this week, juxtaposing Mary's inevitable yet still surprising break up with her fiance with a witness who emerged from a coma only to find he'd been put into witness protection and lost his girlfriend to his former partner. I had suspicions that Mary and Marshall will eventually end up together (M&M? much weirder as a couple name than Booth and Bones) after the second season's finale and Marshall's freakout over Mary's shooting. They got put to rest after Mary got engaged, but it did seem like a breakup was impending, since she's been increasingly reserved in terms of her fiance as of late.

Modern Family was cute and cringeworthy, with Cameron nearly messing up Mitchell's potential job offer at a prestigious environmental law firm. Jay and Phil squabbled over the position of Coach at the kids' basketball game, the former finally conceding the lead to the latter when it became obvious the kids were losing horribly. Gloria and Claire fought over baby Lily after being shunned by their respective preteens. Claire exacted revenge on Alex by embarrassing her in front of some popular girls. Nothing outstanding in terms of humor, but I like that the show maintains doesn't have the family members dissolve into a group of people who are related and hate each other. That seems like the standard when it comes to sitcoms.

I also managed to catch an episode of The Middle, with Everybody Loves Raymond's Patricia Heaton. It's like a throwback to Roseanne, with a blue collar family as the focus, which is a nice change from all of the well to do middle class families currently in Primetime. The family had to deal with financial cutbacks in this episode, with the parents proposing an eschewing of cable in order to save money. The irony lay in their complete dependence on it while the kids picked up hobbies. It's a show I think I could get into, but I'm not entirely gung ho about, and I doubt that I'd mark it in my weekly TV agenda.