YMMV / The Middle

• Adorkable: Sue is a very naive and energetic Cute Clumsy Girl who tends to mess up anything she tries (because of both clumsiness and bad luck), but her eternal optimism keeps her happy all the time and makes her a very endearing character.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Despite his many quirks, Brick just comes off as an apathetic Jerkass sometimes.
  • Sue’s perpetual quirkiness ranges from sympathetic, to funny to plain annoying - sometimes within a single episode.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Season 9's SueSean arc has been dragged out to the point that fans are clearly irritated with the annoyingly slow pace the story is moving at. It's understandable that the Lexl story arc took as long as it did because Lexie was still a fairly new character who needed to be developed and her dynamic with Axl also needed the proper build-up before they got together. But Sean has been on since Season 1 and his dynamic with Sue (as well as character development) had already been given a fair amount of time since then and been well established. The writers clearly want to keep the conflict going as long as possible because they need for Sue not to be happy and relieved so soon and this would resolve all her problems, but even after the two had their First Kiss that should have sealed the deal, the uncertainty the two still have on their feelings just teeters on the thinnest of plot details and comes off as sloppy and lazy. While Romantic False Lead April played her part in the Lexl story well, Aiden didn't even have a purpose because his character comes on a few episodes, has no real stock in the story because no else has anything to really say about their relationship and once he and Sue do end things, nothing is resolved! He felt more like a plot device than anything else! The storyline seems to have come to a stand still (with only occasional progression) that has proven to be a fairly botched effort on the writers' part. Given Lexie went out with Sean before she and Axl got together, there was a great possible story of Axl and Lexie double dating with Sue and Sean that was never explored.
  • Season 9 itself practically is this. Toted "The Farewell Season", the writers have been treating it way too much like a regular season with too much of the same usual hijinks and occasionally bringing on old recurring characters for quick and somewhat unnecessary send-offs. They could have had big stories like whatever would have happened had SueSean been resolved in only a few episodes or the progression of Lexl's relationship, seeing more of Lexie's parents and seeing Lexie become an Ascended Extra and how she becomes more integrated into Axl's family, spending more time with them. Things are expected to really heat up in the final three episodes with big changes occurring, but you wouldn't know it by how safe the rest of the season has been playing it.
• Ass Pull:
  • The whole SueSean arc in Season 9 has been one big one most of the time. "The Christmas Miracle" ended with Sue and Sean having their First Kiss and made fans believe the arc building up their relationship was closed and while not really necessary for almost ten episodes, didn't overstay its welcome. However, "New Year's Revelations" ends with Sue and Sean not talking about how they really felt about the kiss, Sue staying with her current boyfriend Aiden and only a small Hope Spot in which Sean reveals his feelings for Sue to Axl (which implies that it will set up a resolution to the ending between them in "The Confirmation", but it hasn't). On a related note, "The Other Man" ends with Sue deciding not to end things with Aiden because there's the chance he might be the right one for her (he's not, they split three episodes later in "Toasted"). Even then, small teases continue in episodes that follow making it abundantly clear that the writers intend for SueSean's union to be a Last-Minute Hookup. Fans were needless to say unhappy and grown extremely tired with the continued storyline throughout the season.
  • Having Lexie on so little in Season 9 could be deemed one of many others Season 9 has too (especially because she featured so prominently in Season 8). Rather than exploring ideas as to what else could have happened with Lexie and the Hecks or Sue and Sean's relationship after they got together, the season chose to simply set up ideas for the future and then do nothing with them, half the time choosing quick little one-offs in favor of what could have progressed the show forward more thematically. Another big offender of that was "Guess Who's Coming to Frozen Dinner" being about Rusty visiting for dinner and not Lexie's parents Tammy and Bennett (who only got the one episode and didn't get to see the Heck house).
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Lexl shippers found immense satisfaction at the end of Season 8's "The Par-tay" when Axl finally kissed Lexie.
  • As unnecessarily long and frustrating as the SueSean arc was throughout Season 9, the scene when they finally talk to and admit their feelings for each other in the Grand Finale does serve as an incredible payoff, especially with Sean tracking Sue and her family down on the highway after finally finding the snow globe. Axl and Brick addressing their parts in inadvertently covering it up counts too.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Sue's Transparent Closet friend Brad got sent to a religious camp where he got cured... of his smoking.
  • When Sue and Lexie bully a girl with chronic fatigue syndrome because they thought she was faking it.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Brick's disorder is never specified though he does seem to have several symptoms^note such as not making friends with children his own age, lack of interest in social activities, his Verbal Tic (known as echolalia), etc that suggest he may be on the autistic spectrum.
  • Cindy Hornberger, Brick's girlfriend, speaks in a monotone voice, refuses to take her hat off, cannot say something she doesn't mean, and she has little understanding of social etiquette (ex. she has no problem speaking to Brick in the men's room while he's using a stall).
• Fridge Logic: In "Please Don't Feed the Hecks" from Season 9, it isn't just Sue's stubborn pride—and Beckett being her Statistics professor—that keeps her and Lexie from getting their apartment back sooner, but the fact that Lexie's father Bennett—who's paying for the place—would face legal ramifications for not knowing or giving the girls permission to sublet the apartment in the first place—regardless of the fact that Derek and Andy proved to clearly be very untrustworthy—but that the girls themselves could face them too due to their not going through the proper channels was also clearly not having the proper authority as well.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the fifth season, a Running Joke in "The Award" has Sue being mistaken for an exchange student from Ukraine. The episode, obviously written and filmed months earlier, aired the week after serious political unrest in Ukraine, including the deaths of dozens of protesters in the streets of Kiev, forced the country's president to flee.
    • Even worse currently, as Ukraine was invaded by Russia in early 2022 and the war is still ongoing.
  • Season 8's "True Grit" has Brick talking about how much he enjoys the work of Charlie Rose and praising him. Needless to say, the episode was dated back to early November 2016^note Rose was accused of sexual misconduct in late 2017.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "The Neighbor", Sue and Carly try to beat the Glossners in a fight after the latter challenges them by doing a dance off, not knowing what a fight really entails. In Star vs. the Forces of Evil the titular Star Butterfly (voiced by Eden Sher, who plays Sue) has no such problems in knowing how to fight and can be excessive at times. In fact, the episode "School Spirit", Star had... the exact opposite problem when it came to football, acting under the belief it was a blood sport, donning battle armor, thinking a trophy case is a memorial, and mining and laying traps in a football field.
  • Season 9's "Meet the Parents"—which aired in October of 2017—has Mike and Lexie's father Bennett sit down to watch the football game. Mike is a diehard Indianapolis Colts fan with Bennett—also from Indiana—saying he switches teams every now and then and is now rooting for the New England Patriots—which offends Mike. In February of 2018 at Super Bowl LII, the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Patriots with a score of 41-33—which could be Laser-Guided Karma aimed directly at Bennett.
  • The final episode ends with Sue marrying Sean while Lexie is pregnant with Axl's child. In real life, Beau Wirick, who played Sean, married Daniela Bobadilla, who played Lexie, the same year that the show ended.
• Love to Hate: Don Ehlert. He’s a mean boss, sexist, and racist. But his actor, the completely hammy delivery, and everyone’s reactions to him just make you giggle at how awful he is.
• Padding: Quite a bit of it, especially in the later seasons. The whole Disney World fiasco could easily have been narrowed down to one episode rather than two, given that not much happens in the first.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Season 8's "Look Who's Not Talking" has Beth Triffon (Joanne Schwartz) pop up as Marcy, a girl in temporary housing that everyone knows as "Turtleneck Girl".
  • Season 8's "The Final Final" has Sydney Sweeney of all people show up as one of the Sophomore girls at Orson High that attends Sue's visit where she gives advice as a graduate invited back.
• Special Effects Failure: When Sue accidentally burns her hair off in "Not Your Brother's Drop Off", it's obvious that Eden Sher is wearing a wig prior to that scene because she had already cut her hair before filming the episode.
• Spiritual Successor: Often considered this to Malcolm in the Middle due to its similar name, focus on a dysfunctional suburban family, and similar family dynamics to the former series.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Even if Brick started a fire because he used the oven, as he points out it was still incredibly stupid of Frankie to use it to store quilts. As of the ninth season, the oven is still being used to store quilts.
  • The episode where Sue goes to college presents Mike as an incredibly overprotective dad by having her master a ridiculous amount of skills before letting her go. However, nothing about Sue up to this point would lead the viewer to believe that she is ready to live on her own. Even her actions in the episode itself would give anyone doubts.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Lexie's family financially cuts her off. Axl is delighted to show her how to live poor, only for the plot to barely be mentioned again.

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