No laugh track, just comedy

Glorious carnage of ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ returns next year

Do parents on television ever have a clue? Short answer: no. Fictional adults are roughly as far away from any semblance of a clue as they are from the moon. Everything is there in plain sight, but they haven’t the faintest idea how to even think of scratching the surface.

This is an analogy Malcolm, the young long-suffering fourth-wall-breaking-hero of American sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, would certainly attest to – and not just because he alone probably has the IQ to figure out how to build a rocket to actually get to the moon right from his own backyard.

Throughout the early 2000s, from January 2000 to May 2006, the genius Malcolm’s dysfunctional family gave us a beautiful, unapologetic snapshot of the utter carnage of real life involving a handful of wilful, brainy chaos-loving boys, spearheaded by a ruthless, hardworking mother (Lois) and an earnest, loving father (Hal) flying by the seat of his pants.

Whether it is freewheeling family heirlooms from a tree trolley sliding down the roof, catapulting diapers into a neighbour’s lawn, or sneaking away into a carnival at night, Malcolm — and his hapless parents — have seen it all. And now, thanks to a revival that begins filming this month and is scheduled to be released next year, you will even be able to see a little coda of how their adult lives have unfurled.

According to Deadline, Erik Per Sullivan, who played Malcom’s blond younger brother Dewey, will not be returning, having said a resolute goodbye to his acting career years ago. But the rest of the cast have got their bootstraps on and will be there at the helm, pulling us back into Malcolm’s world one last time.

In a world already polluted with reboots, revivals and revisits of stories that already came with a definitive end, do we need another four episodes of Malcolm in the Middle? Of course we do not. But we also didn’t need eight Mission: Impossible films, yet another Smurf offering, or one more Spongebob instalment, and we are getting those anyway. There is no reason we cannot sit back and examine how these former kids navigate their now adult lives. If it ends up being yet another car crash, just like with the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them films, we can always pretend that none of it was ever canon to begin with.

Diamond in the rough

Of course, because Malcolm in the Middle originally aired during that pre-streaming era before we had the world of TV literally in the palm of our hand, you millennials out there may have never actually watched this show from start to finish. Nevertheless, now that we are in that happy world of instant gratification, you can go away and binge the whole thing in order, free from the limitations of the fruitless channel-surfing of your youth.

What was it that set Malcolm in the Middle apart that merits a revival — or a binge watch — at all? For one thing, you are not prompted by a laugh track to laugh in the right places, which is always a blessed relief. Not only did this show chuck out canned laughter, it also opted for a cold opening with every episode consisting of two minutes of wild and utterly entertaining nonsense with zero connection to the plot to follow.

And thus we follow resident genius Malcolm (who can multiply the digits of your credit card number in his head) and his brothers, Reese, Dewey, the incurably criminal Francis, and the eventual baby Jamie, spend their lives battling the iron will of their battle axe mother, Lois, who is capable of dream up the most inventive of punishments, and tricking their hapless father, Hal. Whose side were you on? As a teenager, your heart would have flown straight to Malcolm and co. But if you cave in to nostalgia and backslide into your youth for a revisit, you now probably realise that Malcolm’s parents – and his mother in particular – deserve more credit than they were accorded.

A woman of sense

Although her boys could probably write books on everything wrong with Lois’ parenting style (books heavy enough to be used as a weapon in a wrestling match), Lois is an ordinary looking woman brimming with common sense. As any Y2K TV aficionado who also closely observed, say, Lorelei Gilmore’s carefree take on mothering in Gilmore Girls, you will appreciate now that Lois will stop at nothing to ensure her boys learn to behave, even if it means exporting one of them to military school to shift the problem elsewhere.

This is a functioning adult who works hard at a dead-end job, knows how to use a mop, has a will to iron laundry, and even finds it in her to cook every night. She is no Michelin-star chef, but her boys know her well enough to understand that she also has very low tolerance for unkind reviews about her cooking. Ergo, unusually for television (and real life) children, they shut up and eat what they are given, even if it is last week’s leftovers alongside pasta purged of all flavour.

Unlike other fictional mothers in the television universe, Lois’ world revolves around her children. Rachel Green from Friends may coast through life by putting her (awake) baby down for a nap and ambling out of her apartment (sans baby) five seconds later, but Lois, like real world mothers, does not have unicorn children. She strives for discipline, demands good manners, expects respect, cleans up cuts, manages to elicit a smile from everyone for a family photo, and even attempts to bond with other school mothers over an ill-fated plate of brownies.

Remarkably, she does not murder anyone when one of the mothers bins her loving brownies for defying school allergy rules. Instead, Lois delivers a piece of her mind to every one of these smug mothers and walks away with her head held high and self-esteem intact. In a world of women who need writer Donna Ashcroft to validate their feelings in cute screenshots, Lois is our secret spirit animal.