A reunion with Ray Romano, and why she\u2019s running away from home<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Lie Shia Ong<\/em> When \u201cThe Middle\u201d returns to ABC tonight with its Season\n3 premiere, Patricia Heaton (Frankie) says to be prepared for a lot of laughs.\nThere\u2019s also a special \u201cRaymond\u201d reunion as guest star Ray Romano joins the\ncast. MSN TV spoke with Heaton about what\u2019s going to happen to the Hecks\u2014one of\nAmerica\u2019s favorite families on TV\u2014this season and a little bit about her\nreal-life, family too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MSN TV: What can\nfans expect from the Hecks this season?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Patricia Heaton: The season premiere has Ray Romano as a guest star, with a great flashback to Frankie and Mike\u2019s (Neil Flynn) honeymoon that Ray crashes. It was really fun to see Ray and work with him again even though we worked 16 hours and got rained on and were chased by a bear. [Laughs] So that was really fun. Brick [Atticus Shaffer] gets a new overenthusiastic teacher played by Chord Overstreet from \u201cGlee.\u201d Mike has to deal with him this year because he says he knows how to deal with stuff better, he can get stuff done. So we have that, and we just shot this completely disgusting episode where Axl does something that\u2019s really totally gross and Frankie gets so upset that she runs away from home. She decides her life is just out of control and she doesn\u2019t know what she\u2019s going to do. We just shot that one, which is one of the best episodes of the year, I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You were chased by\na bear. That was part of the show, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n [Laughs] Yes it was. There aren\u2019t any bears running\naround on set!<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was it like\nhaving Ray Romano back on set with you? You worked together for so many years\non \u201cEverybody Loves Raymond.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was great. It\u2019s a different way to work because we are\na single-camera show. When we did \u201cEverybody Loves Raymond,\u201d it was multi-cameras,\nso we had much more time to relax and rehearse, and this was one day, 16 hours\nlong of just really working hard. We have a pretty strict policy. You have to\nbe word-perfect on the script. You will get corrected until you get it, which I\nthink was a little bit of a shock to Ray\u2019s system because I don\u2019t think they\nworked that way on \u201cMen of a Certain Age.\u201d It was really fun, and there are\nsome jokes that the writers put in there as sort of a wink at the fact Ray and\nI played husband and wife previously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn\u2019t the\nfirst time you\u2019ve have a \u201cRaymond\u201d reunion of sorts. Doris Roberts was on the\nshow, too. Any plans on having her come back, too?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s right. It depends. She played Brick\u2019s third-grade\nteacher, and Brick\u2019s graduated to fourth grade. Now we have Chord Overstreet\nfrom \u201cGlee\u201d playing his fourth-grade teacher. If she came back, she\u2019d come back\nin another capacity as something else at the school. We loved having her. She\ndid three episodes last year. It was so much fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your fans have\nbeen tweeting in their questions they wanted us to ask you. Natasha wants to\nknow what episode you\u2019re looking forward to the most for the fans to see this\nseason.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Definitely the season premiere, which is hilarious, and\nthen the one we just shot, where as I said Axl grosses me out to the point\nwhere I literally run away from home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tiffany wants to know, since this is a Season 3 of \u201cThe Middle,\u201d do you have an all-time favorite episode, and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I think the pilot was really great where Frankie did her superwoman costume. Of course all the holiday ones. Holiday shows are generally really funny. I love the one where we tell the kids we\u2019re not going to buy all this crap and waste all this money this year and we don\u2019t really get them anything and my parents undermine us and go ahead and get the kids everything we told them they were not going to get. Also there was [when] we decided we\u2019re not going to cater our whole lives to what the kids want us to do. That was a really popular one. And then there was an episode where our friends are watching our house for a couple days when we go to Splash City, and they go in to collect our mail and they think our house has been robbed because it looks like it\u2019s been ransacked, but the fact is it was just the way our house always looks. Those are some of my favorite ones so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re a mom of four\nboys. How are they doing, and is it easier to balance your work and family life\nnow that they\u2019re back in school?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We try. I have this hiatus week off, so I\u2019ll be picking up the kids from school and from football and all their activities. I occasionally get one or a half day off a week\u2014or sometimes my call time works out so I can drive them into school and be a part of that. It\u2019s hard and I\u2019m usually tired, but we manage it. And the boys are now all in high school and middle school, so they\u2019re very busy from 8 in the morning until 8 at night, between after-school sports and activities and homework\u2014so if they were little, I wouldn\u2019t be able to work such long hours. I wouldn\u2019t be able to do this show, but now that they\u2019re older and kind of doing their own life\u2026I\u2019m able to fit this in better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do you ever sit\ndown as a family and watch \u201cThe Middle\u201d together?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I make them! [Laughs] \u201cStop doing your homework and come\nwatch my show!\u201d [Laughs]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Any message you\nwant to send to your fans?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Thank you so much for watching the show. We\u2019ve got a ton\nof really wonderful, great stuff coming up this season that\u2019s hilarious that I\u2019ll\nknow you love. I appreciate your support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A reunion with Ray Romano, and why she\u2019s running away from home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-msn-entertainment","category-portfolio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":879,"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions\/879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lieshiaong-sintzel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
MSN TV<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n