‘The Middle’ Spinoff Gets Title, Adds New Cast Member

The Middle spinoff is well underway, and the Sue Heck-centered series has now been given a title as well as a supporting cast member.

The Hollywood Reporter shares that the show will be titled Sue Sue in the City and will follow Eden Sher’s Sue as she leaves college and her hometown in Indiana for life in Chicago.

Joining Sher will be Brock Ciarlelli, who portrayed Sue’s best friend Brad Bottig on The Middle. Ciarlelli appeared in 56 episodes of The Middle and will be a series regular on the spinoff.

ABC has greenlit the pilot for Sue Sue in the City, with the series having gone into development shortly after The Middle‘s series finale in May.

“Cue the Sue happy dance,” the show’s logline reads, via Entertainment Weekly. “More Sue Heck is on the way. The series follows the twentysomething adventures of eternal optimist Sue Heck as she leaves the small town of Orson to navigate the ups and downs of a career and young adulthood in the big city of Chicago.”

The Middle premiered in 2009, running for nine seasons as a continually a solid performer, despite many believing it was underrated by critics. The show focused on a middle class family in a small Indiana town, with Sue the awkward middle child of the Heck family’s three children.

Quickly becoming a fan-favorite character, Sue evolved over the series into someone unabashedly confident in themselves, though it remains to be seen how Sue’s unwavering optimism will fare against the pressures of adulthood in the new series.

The Middle‘s series finale saw Sue and neighbor Sean Donohue (Beau Winick) finally share their feelings for each other, with a flash-forward finding the pair in an off-and-on relationship and eventually getting married. While it’s unclear whether this storyline will be continued in the spinoff, it’s fair to assume that fans will at least hear a little bit about Sean in regards to present-day Sue.

“We’re doing a pilot,” Sher told TV Line at Comic-Con this summer. “I hope it gets picked up … I’m allowed to talk about the pilot, but I don’t want to jinx it. I think it’s going to be great.”

“It would be somewhere in between the end of the show and that future. It would not be in the flash-forward, I can tell you that,” she added of the show’s timeline. “I don’t think she’d be married. That would take place like 10 years in the future, so I know it’s not going to be like that. She’s not going to be married.”

Sher added that the spinoff also likely won’t take place directly after The Middle‘s series finale.

“It wouldn’t be in college,” she said. “I think it would be a little [farther] but not in the future enough to be married. I think that was a happily ever after thing for really far [away]. That’s not Sue being Sue as a young adult.”

No premiere date has yet been announced for Sue Sue in the City, but the show could make its debut midseason if it is officially ordered to series.

Photo Credit: ABC