While other hit sitcoms of yore have stayed busy in their hiatus years, milking the cash cow dry with rewatch podcasts and Superbowl ads teasing some far-off return, Malcolm in the Middle has been relatively dormant. Ever since Frankie Muniz’s neurotic boy genius threw his graduation cap into the air back in 2006, bringing six years and seven seasons of gloriously chaotic telly to an end, the cast and creators have hardly made a peep about their beloved show.
And for that, I thank them. It has meant that old fans have been able to rewatch the series, and new ones have been able to discover it without the Ghost of Reboot Yet to Come hovering over proceedings. For two whole decades, Malcolm was allowed to exist exactly as it was: a perfectly pitched, oddball sitcom about America’s most dysfunctional family, superbly acted and creatively experimental. Seven Emmys don’t lie – and really, there should have been more.
So when a Malcolm reboot was announced back in December, I was apprehensive. Subsequent news that it would be a limited series of only four episodes assuaged some of these worries – and so too did the trailer, which went hard on the nostalgia with scenes of property destruction, incessant yelling, and my personal prototype for a lasting marriage: Hal (Bryan Cranston) and Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) making out in public. I’d go so far to say that I was actually, albeit tentatively, excited by the prospect of more Malcolm. Having now seen the reboot… my first instincts were right.
Set in the present day, Malcolm is all grown up and using his 165-IQ for the greater good, working for a charity. He has a beautiful girlfriend and a healthy relationship with his teenage daughter. Life is… good? He can hardly believe it himself. “My life is fantastic,” Malcolm says to camera. “All I need to do is stay completely away from my family.”
That family is hundreds of miles away, living in the same house that Malcolm grew up in – although it’s in much better shape than when we last saw it. Older brother Francis (Christopher Masterson) is settled down but still has mommy issues; Reese (Justin Berfield) is ever the menace; Dewey (now played by Caleb Ellsworth-Clark) is a touring pianist and unlikely casanova; and Jamie, a baby in the original run, is buff now and in the coastal guard. There is also Kelly, the perhaps forgotten-about sixth sibling, whose existence first came to light in the graduation finale all those years ago, when we discovered Lois was pregnant. Kelly, played by Vaughan Murrae, is non-binary.
Trouble begins when Lois and Hal show up at Malcolm’s house unannounced to demand that he attend their 40th anniversary bash, only to discover this secret life he has been hiding from them. His daughter Leah (Keeley Karsten) is gobsmacked too, having been told by her dad that her grandparents were dead. As inciting incidents go, it’s a promising one that allows for a lot of conflict (something the show has always done well). It’s also one with teeth; a son hiding his family out of embarrassment is not just diabolical, it’s sad.
It’s such a shame, then, that the show never lives up to its premise. The actors are still funny – Cranston’s face is as elastic and expressive as ever, and if you close your eyes, Reese, Francis and Malcolm sound exactly as they did two decades ago – but the script gives them less and less to do. The plot instead scatters the family members on individual paths in the lead up to the big finale. The formidable and brilliant Kaczmarek is wasted on scenes in which she runs errands by herself while Hal embarks on a spiritual solo journey. And sure, the idea of Hal locking himself in a room after ingesting a bowlful of hallucinogenics sounds like a classic Malcolm subplot – absurd and hilarious – but the drawn-out way it’s done here makes even that seem tedious. It takes over an episode for Hal to break free.
While the original series did relish in sending its characters off on side-quests (Hal and his speed-walking; Malcolm and the Krelboynes; that time Reese tried to ship himself in a crate to China to beat up his pen pal), it always knew that it was at its best when the family were together – something that scarcely happens in this reboot. The brothers themselves share so little screen time, you start to think there were scheduling issues.
When they do eventually come together at the anniversary party finale, the family reunion is fleeting and feels a bit cheap. Set amid an endless parade of familiar faces – everyone from Francis’s military school buddies to Stewie’s estranged mother makes an appearance – it feels inconsequential.
More strange still is the slideshow that Lois makes for Hal: a compilation of video messages from his friends and kids attesting to what a great man he is, set against some tearjerk-y music. Such a blatant signposting of emotion is odd given that one of the best things about Malcolm was that it never had to spell out the sentimentality behind the gags – it was just there, in the way the boys rallied to support Lois against Hal’s snooty family. Or when Lois went full John Wick on the popular girls who trick Reese into going to prom with a pig. Or the countless times that Hal proved himself the ultimate devoted husband. The original show was like The Simpsons in that way, hilarious but full of heart.
And given this is a show where the whole point is ostensibly to pay fan service to a loyal audience, we spend an awful lot of time with its new characters, namely Kelly and Leah, who is having trouble making friends at her private school. This brings us to what I suspect may be the real reason for this reboot: to set up a potential spin-off focused on Leah, who has tellingly inherited her father’s fourth wall-breaking powers.
Old sitcoms tend to age on a scale of milk to deli meat, but Malcolm was different in that, despite its unmistakably early Noughties setting, the show felt timeless in a way – an oddball tale of true blue weirdos that is as watchable now as it was then. That the reboot failed to recapture its bizarre charisma is unfortunate, but unsurprising. Luckily, all six seasons of the original are also available on Disney+. Watch that again instead.
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