From its premiere episode in 2000, Malcolm in the Middle specialised in black comedy painted in the brightest of colours. Centred on a frenziedly dysfunctional household, for seven seasons, the show set its single-camera gaze upon a family without a surname living hand-to-mouth in an unnamed city.
The clan’s love language was a short-tempered bewilderment that often blossomed into rage. In the history of network television, rarely has the American ideal of happiness and prosperity been allowed to drift so far from the lens.
And now it’s back. Returning to the small screen after a 20-year absence, in Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, the long-term effects of past familial carnage see its titular character living hundreds of miles from his childhood home. Mom and dad’s house lies three plane rides away. His own daughter believes her grandparents are dead.
In a delicious application of the show’s polarities, upon discovering her son’s deceit, mother Lois is at first the embodiment of parental concern. “Getting Malcolm back into this family” is the important thing, she says. Sounds wholesome enough, right?
At a stroke, though, her face assumes a look of magnificent menace. “Making him pay for what he’s done” is also part of the deal.
Unlike the 151 standalone episodes that preceded it, these four instalments are connected by a single idea. Lois and husband Hal – the unimprovable Jane Kaczmarek and Bryan Cranston – are about to mark 40 years of marriage with a party that threatens to devour their life savings. Snippets of family violence from years past cast doubt on the notion that the gathering will be a celebration worthy of the name.
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The story is both purposefully chaotic and quietly profound. At first detained by the need to reframe a vast cast of characters in a modern setting – delinquent son Reese has a sideline posting his father’s DIY mishaps on the internet – by the time the first episode roars on to open road, the process by which patriarch and matriarch are cornered into a stocktake of their lives is under way. The question is this: is family – in this case, a fractious and wildly uncontrollable family – a just legacy for decades of struggle?
In its original iteration, Malcolm in the Middle distinguished itself by introducing its characters without a backstory. Rapt by this blank canvas, I used to imagine that Lois and Hal were once the happiest young people in America. I could see them as freewheeling Deadheads whose lives of liberty were ended at a stroke by an unexpected pregnancy. Goodbye to the Grateful Dead – hello to an office job (for him) and employment in an oversized drugstore (for her).
Beneath the laughter, the circumstances were enduringly bleak. As children – five more in all – appeared like Whack-a-Moles, life found its level on the breadline. Intimate moments became both the cause and the cure of the parents’ despond.
“We don’t turn down sex,” Lois tells her husband in the new series. “We’ve done it at weddings and funerals and petting zoos.”
One of the many towering achievements of MITM is a radical edge that knocks even the finest American comedy into the shade. In The Simpsons, for example, Homer and Marge occasionally engage with politics; on Sundays, they take the kids to church.
For their part, Lois and Hal raise children who are loved but not liked. Arguing over which bills can be ignored for the month, the couple have no qualms about sending their eldest son, the epically wayward Francis, to military school.
Adrift in a country that slaps the fillings from your teeth, even the exceptional talents of the show’s title character prove to be extraneous. Despite boasting an IQ of 156, in adulthood, Malcolm’s smarts have brought him no closer than his lower-wattage siblings to seizing the trappings of the American Dream. With a soupçon of social commentary, rather than becoming a billionaire in Silicon Valley, he runs a charity for people living in food poverty.
It becomes apparent that the enduring motif of this (ostensibly) broad comedy is that intelligence alone is a worthless attribute. Unmoored to ambition – or to its distant cousin, sociopathy – on Main Street in America brains count for much less than bravado or chutzpah.
For once speaking with authority, Donald Trump explained this tendency rather well. “People may not always think big themselves,” he said, “but they can still get very excited by those who do.”
It’s either this or be ground down by life in the Land of the Free. Trying not to drown in the American storm, on screen, Malcolm is ignored by characters that know – as they have always known – that his gift offers neither respite nor protection from a hard rain that may never abate.
At least, it hasn’t yet. As the United States retreats further into the gloom, I’m reminded of the words of psychotic grandfather, Victor, at the family dinner table in an episode that is now a quarter of a century old. Learning that Malcolm is studying complex algebra in an advanced class at school, the old man harumphs with contempt.
“What is that?” he asks. “What good is math in war?”
Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
Ian Winwood is the bestselling author of Bodies: Life and Death in Music
