Season One 8 x 30mins, 2023

Watch The Extended Season One Trailer

Elena Wohl (Seinfeld, Spotlight) and Mark Damon Espinoza (End Game, Beverly Hills, 90210)
lead an extraordinary cast in MIDDLEHOOD, a new half-hour, single-camera series
about the universally comic tragedy we call midlife.

For Lisa Giordano Navarro, midlife is messy. At 50, she crashes head-on into a moment when the years she’s lived meet the years she has left – and it scares her.

So she blows up her life
for a chance at a do-over.

We meet Lisa newly separated from her husband Bill Navarro (Espinoza) and having just lost her job teaching at a respected Ivy League university. But just as she embarks on this new journey of self-discovery, Lisa is confronted with her most bedeviling challenge yet – parenting her unruly aging parents – and battling her childish adult brothers.

How can she face middle age when
she still feels like a kid?

The first season of
MIDDLEHOOD
an 8-episode series
from creator/writer/director Michele Palermo
dives deep into midlife crisis
while mirroring our changing culture
and wide generational divide.
With the intimate honesty and illuminating time-shifts of Tiny Beautiful Things,
and the social conflicts of All In The Family,
MIDDLEHOOD is a unique blend of humor and humanity
that will captivate audiences around the world.

Lisa

Lisa is a paradox – a funny tangle of head and heart, always fighting her way out of the middle.

She’s the dutiful, first-America-born generation-only-daughter of immigrants. And a born rebel. An accomplished professor who feels like a failure. A woman who loves with abandon – until she finds herself alone.

Middle-aged, mid-divorce, “mid career” (yeah, out of work), Lisa’s starting fresh at fifty, but her larger-than-life family and the love she can’t let go has this middle child feeling stuck.

It’s the holidays. Lisa’s come from NYC to drive her elderly parents from Nevada to California for the Big Family Gathering with her brothers (and their others). But unwrapping memories – and hidden truths triggers surprises for all.

Bill

There's been one big change in Lisa's life: BILL Navarro.

Lisa's soon-to-be ex is still the Yang to her Yin. But 25 years in, the contrasts that drew them together have driven them crazy and apart.

Like Lisa, Bill's a jumble of contradictions: a successful attorney who hates his job, a good husband who can't manage marriage...

And the Giordanos are no help. Bill learned the hard way: you can take the girl out of her family, but you can't take that family out of this girl.

Despite everything, Lisa and Bill still love each other. Fiercely. They keep trying to meet in the middle. But damned if their timing isn't always juuust off.

Lisa's

family

Lisa's parents, ELLA and ALDO Giordano, were a classic love story when they met 58 years ago. Their marriage? That's another story. Aldo cheated, Ella nagged, but they've made it into their eighties together... in a "can't live with 'em, don't wanna die alone" way.

These European immigrants (he from Italy, she from Germany), are still very old school, despite Lisa's best efforts and her totally opposite world view. The family dynamic is tense. And funny... in a "can't live with 'em, can't really kill 'em" way.

TANO

Giordano (55) is a textbook case of “oldest child syndrome.”

He’s the reliable, conservative, conscientious one — at least in his parents’ eyes.

NISHA

Desai (44) Delhi-born, London-bred, long-divorced, has been Tano's girlfriend and (and nothing more!) for too long.

He's bringing her to the Big Family Gathering for the first time. After sixteen years together. It's no surprise they're both a bit on edge.

SARAH

Macron left Tano sixteen years ago. When she caught him cheating. With Nisha, Running into them at the airport on Christmas Eve, realizing Nisha was more than just an affair for Tano, throws Sarah for a loop

But she has an awkward surprise of her own.

MARCO

MARCO Giordano (40) may be the youngest in his family, but don’t call him “baby”! Marco doesn’t just strive to catch up to his siblings, but to leave them in his dust. He’s a renowned chef with his own A-list restaurant. He inherited his father’s drive, his lust for life - and his temper

MANUELA

Abello-Giordano (38) has family in Cartagena and a B.S. in Linguistics. She married Marco the day after they graduated from USC, had twins GIA and CESCO three months later, and SAL thirteen years into putting up with Marco's family's B.S.

middlehood