"YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME NOW!" They Might Be Giants' theme song for 2000's FOX sitcom about a boy genius brings a certain generation of television viewers right back to those nights of watching a block of prime time comedies at the dawn of the new millennium, in the brief time when we would watch a scrambled signal on bunny eared antennas. I personally have fond memories of coming home from school, completing my homework to a certain degree and eagerly awaiting the block of reruns that would begin with Home Improvement at 6:00 PM and end with the network's centerpiece The Simpsons after the 10:00 PM news.
As a version of America's "average" family, Malcolm in the Middle leans heavily toward the latter's more fractured, dysfunctional take. Incidentally, multiple graduates of The Simpsons' writing staff from the show's golden era ended up working on Malcolm. The same cynical, irreverent humor that brought down fading Nuclear family conventions pervaded in the latter, ten years after that show first aired and thirteen years after Married...With Children. I remember when Malcolm was marketed in its first few years, it almost appeared to be an offbeat teen heartthrob vehicle for its protagonist, played with aplomb by Frankie Muniz.
Malcolm was anything but another Jonathan Taylor Thomas affair. Unlike the more wholesome afternoon fare of Saved by the Bell or Boy Meets World, it reveled in its boundless threshold for silliness and a fondness for losers. Where Home Improvement centered its episodes around a character's moral dilemma before ending it with hugs and lessons learned, Malcolm almost routinely ended its episodes with characters ending up in deeper predicaments by its second season. We would laugh at Malcolm and his family as they helplessly spiraled out of control into trouble, whether it involved a character being dumped or the family ending up in financial dire straits. We laughed not from a high horse, but right along with the family because they would end up in the kind of "Murphy's Law" situations that are truer to life than the picturesque situations on more wholesome shows.
Not that the show was completely immoral, which was the unfairly common criticism often associated with shows like The Simpsons or Beavis & Butthead. Like the former, Malcolm's family wore their lack of manners and basic decency toward each other as a twisted badge of honor. While most episodes found the children in the family and even the adults literally at war with one another, many episodes ended with the family reaffirming their love for another, though usually in the midst of a scuffle or a food fight.
This fearlessly cynical sense of humor comes courtesy of the show's staff, many of whom come from the often Ivy League-educated generation of writers that gave The Simpsons, Futurama and King of the Hill the same pointed, often mercilessly cruel and sometimes completely off-the-wall sense of humor. Malcolm walked that same fine line between intelligence and silliness, which found characters referring to Chaucer as "pop culture" and brainstorming ways to taunt a girl named "Regina (Ra-Jyna) Tucker", often in the same five minutes.
What really made Malcolm in the Middle something of an anomaly in non-animated TV sitcoms was the fact that the show retained its energetic humor for an admirable six or seven seasons, depending on who you'd ask. Comedy shows generally "jump the shark" by the sixth-season mark and rarely continue any further. The last two seasons of a sitcom tend to be unfunny and sometimes painfully depressing in light of its predecessors. Some of Malcolm's most laughter inducing jokes came from the last two seasons, when the show took advantage of its aging characters and emphasized their "hapless loser" aspect to offset the inevitably fleeting "cute" appeal associated with the younger cast members.
In addition to the direction staying strong, the cast similarly never seemed to phone it in by the later seasons. Featuring character heavyweights like Jane Kaczmarek and the now-ubiquitous Bryan Cranston in unforgettable roles. Kaczmarek revolutionized TV mothers in her turn as one of the
meanest, sometimes most cold blooded characters since Nurse Ratched, yet
that cruelty is tempered by a steely code of honor that often functions
as the show's moral compass. As Hal, Cranston is her equal, who is never afraid to wear ridiculous, form fitting outfits or devote an entire episode to winning a match of Dance Dance Revolution. The children's performances are understandably more cartoonish, but it works in their favor with Muniz's almost constantly sour expressions and Justin Berfield's charmingly naive idiocy driving the laughs late into the show's run.
I miss Malcolm in the Middle because it was the last show of an effortlessly funny generation. I rarely watch any comedy these days, as it often ranges from a self conscious dryness that feels more like obnoxiousness or a formulaic randomness pioneered by Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow's camp. Malcolm in the Middle's characters were mean, but exercised that meanness within a well-constructed comic situation. The randomness didn't try to revive the early '90s stoner sensibilities but was rather a reflection of its naturally clueless characters. Everything had a reason behind it, whether or not it was apparent. And most importantly, Malcolm was one of the last few shows that championed the humorous appeal of true idiocy over vulgarity, though it had its share of the latter.
Thank God for Netflix.
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