The Middle/Trivia

• Actor Allusion:
  • In the Season 1 finale, Neil Flynn's character mentions a brain trust.
  • Also in the Season 2 premiere, Frankie goes to meet Brick's new teacher. Playing the teacher? Doris Roberts! Or Marie of Everybody Loves Raymond! She ironically accuses Frankie of smothering her children.
  • In the Season 3 premiere, the hiker played by Ray Romano tells Frankie "In an alternate universe you and I could have been very happy together."
  • In the episode "The Paper Route", Edward Asner plays the publisher of the Orson Herald.
• The Character Died With Her: Aunt Ginny. At the end of the third-season episode "The Map", which had begun with the Hecks coming back from her funeral, there was an In Memoriam to Frances Bay, the actress who had played her until her death several months earlier.
• Dawson Casting:
  • When the show started, Axl is a high school freshman and he's played by a 19 year old. Sue, a seventh grader, has an 18 year old actress. Brick is supposed to be in second grade, but the actor playing him is 11 years old. To be fair, the actor playing Brick (Atticus Shaffer) has Type IV Ostogenesis Imperfecta (also known as brittle bone disease), which causes him to be a lot smaller than average.
  • For the same reason, he is almost never filmed walking all by himself within a certain distance of the camera, as he has a noticeable limp.
  • A rare forgivable example in the cases of Axl and Sue since both actors actually do look much younger than their actual ages. Even at the age of 23, the actor who plays Axl still looks like a teenager. Though the same can't be said for the actors who play Darren and Sean who both look like they're in their late 20s. It was even lampshaded in the episode where Sue wanted to date Darren with Mike objecting because "he's 18 and he looks 30!"
    • Sue does strain credulity a bit early in the third season when she tells Frankie she just had her first period, given that Eden Sher is, uh, quite a developed young lady.
• Edited for Syndication: The Middle is already a pretty family-friendly show, but Hallmark Channel for whatever reason feels the need to make it extra squeaky-clean, removing words like "damn", "piss", and "nipple" on an inconsistent basis.
• Hey, It's That Girl: Brooke Shields in "The Neighbor" and Betty White in "Average Rules".
  • Not to mention the Almighty Janitor from Scrubs... as the father.
  • And Doris Roberts, Patricia's character's archnemesis from Raymond, as Brick's teacher.
  • Apparently Sam "White Chocolate" Evans did a stint as an elementary school teacher while he was away from Lima.
• Hey, It's That Voice!: Why is Captain K'Nuckles/The Flying Dutchman running the car dealership?
  • And how does Tom make it from his job running the P.A. in Indiana to his home in Florida in an hour and a half?
• Reality Subtext:
  • Plots in two episodes are based on events from the actors' real lives. Atticus Shaffer once went out for Halloween as the same obscure Scottish World War I hero Brick did in the first Halloween episode, and Patricia Heaton's family once hosted a Japanese exchange student who didn't say a word to them for two weeks—just like what happens in "Foreign Exchange".
• Real Life Relative: Dick and Jerry Van Dyke really are brothers.
• Recycled Script: Season 7's "Survey Says..." has Brick taking an office store's online shopping survey too seriously... exactly like in Season 5's "The Wind Chimes" when he thinks his suggestion to a pretzel company's 1-800 number will make or break them. In both episodes, he incorrectly assumed that participation automatically made him an official employee.
• Write What You Know: Frankie's later retraining as a dental hygienist mirrors one of the show's creators, who formerly worked in that capacity herself.