MIDDLEHOOD – Season 1 Key Art | ©2025 Tubi

MIDDLEHOOD is a half-hour dramedy series focused on Lisa Giordano-Navarro (Elena Wohl) and her family. The title has multiple meanings. Lisa is age fifty, thus in the middle of her life. She’s also in the middle of a variety of personal crises and is literally in the middle of the road for a few episodes as she travels by car from Nevada with her parents to meet up with her brothers and their kin in Los Angeles for the holidays. Patience is tested, secrets are spilled, laughter ensues. The series is available to stream on Prime Video, YouTube and, as of October 16, on Tubi.

MIDDLEHOOD is the creation of Michele Palermo, who wrote and directed all of the first season’s eight episodes. The show is entirely independently produced, without network, studio or institutional sponsorship, which makes its eligibility for Emmy and SAG Awards a rarity.

In fact, Palermo explains over a Zoom interview, “Back when there was FYC [For Your Consideration] back in May for the Emmys, I wanted the show to be considered. So, I submitted it, and they contacted me and said, ‘Your show really isn’t eligible for the Emmys, because it was made independently, it was self-produced …’ And I said, ‘Well, did you watch it?’” she laughs.

“They were like, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Okay, do me a favor. The whole Primetime Emmy thing is a little funky, because there’s no more primetime anymore, so that doesn’t really work. But I believe that my show is as good as anything that you would see in primetime, any other show that’s being considered. So, can I ask you to look at it? I will send you links.’ And so, they said, ‘Okay, we’ll look at it.’

“And they did. There was a committee of seven people who watched it, and they approved it for Emmy consideration. Of course, we didn’t get nominated for anything, because we’re in a giant pool with giants, but the very fact that we were able to be considered in that pool was huge. So, I was really proud of that.

“So, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for SAG and Independent Spirit [Awards]. Being nominated in one of those would really help just in terms of getting this show profile lifted.”

MIDDLEHOOD has already won Best TV Show and Best Director at the New York International Film Festival, and the Audience Award at Dances with Films and Series Fest, among many other accolades.

Director and creator Michele Palermo of MIDDLEHOOD | ©2025 WerdGerL

Creator Palermo, also an award-winning playwright and an instructor who specializes in film and television history and pilot-writing at Columbia University, has previously developed series with Peter Horton and David E. Kelley. Additionally, she is an actor whose screen credits include STRANGERS and CHAPIN CIRCLE. MIDDLEHOOD is her first excursion into entirely independent television.

Doing the show independently wasn’t her first plan, Palermo relates.

The premise for MIDDLEHOOD is “based on a personal experience I had with my own family, and it broadened out from there. I had originally written the pilot and a couple of episodes and I went out to pitch it as an idea and people were like, ‘Ah, it’s interesting, So-and-So wants to do a family show …’ I was like, ‘Well, I get it, I’m happy to meet with anybody to help them do their family show, but this is a very specific show about a woman in her fifties, who is the child of immigrants, and is stuck in the middle of every single one of the worst crossroads of life. She’s in the middle of this crazy family, she’s in the middle of a divorce, she’s in the middle of losing her job, trying to find a new job, and really in the middle of her life.’

“And instead of taking the idea and having it shred through the Hollywood factory system, I decided to make the pilot myself. I really wanted to keep it what I wanted. And as we made the pilot, which we started actually before COVID, I just fell in love with the actors that I cast. I fell in love with the idea of doing this my way.”

Although she has developed projects for herself as a performer, Palermo says, “I knew with MIDDLEHOOD, I really wanted it to have an actor fronting this who was not me.”

In one instance, Palermo turned to a friend. “I know Mark Espinoza, so I asked him if he would do a role in the piece, because I love working with him, and I gave him a choice of playing one of Lisa’s two brothers or playing [Lisa’s estranged husband] Bill, and he chose Bill, because he thought that that was a good role for him, and he brought such empathy and such love to that role.”

Otherwise, “I held traditional auditions in L.A. When we came back from COVID, for many of our actors, we were the first in-person audition that they had done [since the lockdown]. Because COVID, everybody went to self-tapes. I’ll watch self-tapes just to make sure you know how to act, but chemistry is so important that the whole idea that everybody’s just going off self-tapes is crazy. So, we had in-person auditions.”

There were a lot of them. “We have fifty-one actors in the show, and because we do go back in time, the main characters all have a younger self, and [Lisa Goodman], who plays the mother [Ella], actually has four versions of herself at different ages. I truly think we have one of the best ensemble casts ever assembled. We have one name actor, Mark, and then Gabrielle Carteris, who worked with him on 90210, came in to do a cameo for us. But most of our actors are working actors who you might know, and you might go, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that person somewhere,’ but they aren’t names.”

COVID threw a wrench into MIDDLEHOOD’s initial momentum. “We shot two episodes and then got shut down. During that interim [shutdown] period, I edited those two episodes and I took them out to festivals, and we won a ton of awards in 2021 and 2022.

“Once the COVID lockdown lifted, I decided to finish the season. And so, I raised the money and we shot the next six episodes. There was no corporation behind us. A lot of people say ‘independently produced,’ but they have some big corporate entity behind them. This was all independently-raised money, very small private investment, and also by Kickstarter.”

With a two-year jump in production on a story that, save for flashbacks, is supposed to occur over one week, were there continuity issues?

There were, both expected and otherwise. “We had to reshoot some of the footage of the family that has a little kid, not only because of the little kid getting older but also, the young actor who played the littlest boy in Marco’s [Chris Mollica] family got cancer during COVID. He’s fine now, but he was unavailable to do the shoot, so we had to go back and reshoot that family.

“Other than that, trying to match hairdos, trying to match [other elements] – with adults, it’s not impossible, Children, it’s a little harder. Children get a little bit bigger. But we managed it. It was a challenge, but we did manage it. So, you have to watch the whole show and see if you can catch it,” Palermo laughs.

Given that MIDDLEHOOD is based at least partly on Palermo’s own family, how have her family members reacted to their fictional counterparts?

“My mom, who saw the first two episodes, passed away before the show was finished, but she loved it. She was almost ninety-four. I’m very sorry that she didn’t get to see the finished product, because the show is, in its essence, a love story between a mother and a daughter. It’s really a tribute to my mother and her history and the way that she came to this country, and who she was. I go back into her childhood in Germany. So, she loved it, she loved herself.”

Furthermore, “My dad loved it, he loved the depiction of himself by Richard [Milanesi], who’s an ex-Marine and super-handsome. My one brother is like, ‘Why did you make me so angry?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t quite make you as angry as you are.’ But ultimately, these are characters inspired by, not necessarily exactly like [their real-life counterparts]. My one sister-in-law said, ‘Oh, my gosh, you really think well of me. The woman you cast is so beautiful.’

“Writers always write about things close to us, so that’s always an interesting journey, when people see themselves on screen the way you’ve recreated them. But what I was really recreating was the dynamic of my family at the holidays, which is not Hallmark,” Palermo laughs.

“It’s very chaotic. And I feel like that’s the case for a lot of families nowadays, that it doesn’t feel all cozy and warm necessarily at the holidays, with everybody’s different political beliefs. We do lean into that in the show a little bit. As much as we want to create an idyllic Norman Rockwell situation, families just don’t roll like that.”

Speaking of rolling, Palermo went out to Las Vegas and, with one of her fellow producers, shot the drive back to California. For the most part, “We shot everything in and around L.A. and, believe it or not, Santa Clarita looks very much like Henderson, Nevada. I have a feeling that Santa Clarita was developed by the same development company that developed the place that my parents live in Henderson, because it looked almost identical.

“We filmed the drive back, so that we could use that as our composite shots in the windows, because I wanted that to be very authentic. That’s a very specific look, that drive, between leaving Las Vegas and then the desert and then coming into Fontana/Upland [in California], that drive that I wanted to capture the reality of. So, we had this very funny drive, where I was holding one jib out the window, and [the other producer] was holding one in the front window, and the other one out her passenger window, trying to get all of the footage that we would need.”

Palermo sees MIDDLEHOOD as part of a growing trend in independent TV series.

“As the traditional television industry feels like it’s constricting in a certain way, there is this movement that very much mirrors the indie film movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, where people are finding ways to make television their way.

Certainly ours looks, feels, plays like a primetime show because that’s what I wanted, that was my goal. I wanted to make a primetime-quality television show independently. But as this morphs, there are going to be all sorts of ways to make and broadcast television. Netflix says that their biggest competitor is YouTube, and so, the whole dynamic of how television is being made and shown and distributed is changing. And to be sort of at the forefront of that and making room and making space for people to come and be able to do that is also really exciting. So, I’m glad MIDDLEHOOD is doing that.”

Do the awards for MIDDLEHOOD give Palermo an added sense of validation, or does she already feel that she has achieved what she set out to do?

“Well, it’s always nice that people like the work and, to be honest, getting the accolades helps place the show ultimately. But for me, having been able to do this was its own reward in a way. My biggest hope is that it finds an audience. That is ultimately what we want when we make television, is for it to find a loyal audience, and I would obviously love for one of the places that we are streaming it to fall in love with it and see that it’s getting a great audience and offer to fund us for a second season.

“Even if it would be certainly years past the first season, it would be interesting to go back and figure out how to keep telling the story with a time gap in it. But really, it’s not so much the awards, it’s the audience, it’s people watching it and getting something out of it.

“I got a really cool email [from a woman] who told me that she had lost her son a couple of weeks before, and she was grieving and she had come upon MIDDLEHOOD just by chance, and that the show had provided her not only with some laughter and some light moments, but with a place and a way to quietly heal. And I thought, ‘Hey, if the show can do that, then I’m happy.’ That’s really what we’re doing this for.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview: Creator-director-Executive Producer Michele Palermo on new dramedy series

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