At this point, Bryan Cranston is firmly entrenched as one of the world’s finest actors. He has seven Emmys, two Tonys and a Golden Globe to his name. History, quite rightly, will remember him as one of the greats. That said – and this really wasn’t a sentence I expected to write a couple of hours ago – there is a distinct possibility that the greatest work of his entire career might be the scene in the Malcolm in the Middle revival where he thrashes around naked as he is overcome by a drug-induced ego death.
Perhaps this does make some small amount of sense. Although Malcolm in the Middle became best known as an absurd counterpoint to Breaking Bad – the sheer dramatic intensity of the latter playing against the generic sitcom daddery of the former – those of us who always loved the show knew that Cranston spent a lot of it going full throttle.
Malcolm in the Middle, after all, was the sitcom that kept cutting back to Cranston having his back shaved, or covered in bees, or screaming in horror because he thought his son’s skull had just exploded. If you threw that much at Cranston before he became an icon, then a gibbering chemical breakdown barely feels like a stretch.
All of this is to say that Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair is so much more fun than it has any right to be. We live in an age where sitcoms of old have a habit of coming back either tired (the new Scrubs) or lazy (the Friends reunion), but that particular memo didn’t reach the target here. Everything about the new Malcolm in the Middle is cranked all the way up. It’s faster and funnier than before, its emotional beats hitting harder and its story hanging together as a cohesive whole. Quite honestly, it’s miraculous how well it works.
Story wise, 20 years have passed since we last checked in. Malcolm, the child genius prone to fits of stress-induced sociopathy, has grown up alarmingly normal. This, we learn, is because he has put distance (physical and emotional) between himself and the full-blown chaos of his family life. Circumstances have conspired to force him – and his secret teenage daughter – back into the fold, and it isn’t long before this respectable pillar of the community regresses into the screaming maniac of old.
What’s so refreshing here isn’t just that the four-episode revival is so brief and self-contained, but that it manages to feel authentic to the original without being a simple facsimile. The show’s message was always about how hard it is to forge your own identity inside an overbearing family, and this feels like a logical extension of that. How do you become a better version of yourself? By going no-contact and breaking away. It makes perfect sense.
The parents still get the bulk of the good material. Jane Kaczmarek remains the centre of gravity, so used to keeping it together for everyone else that she has become a brittle control freak. Cranston is clearly at the top of his game, too, singing and dancing and confronting multiple versions of himself while lost in a void of infinite consciousness. And, since the show always revelled in putting him in uncomfortable situations, the final scene – which I won’t spoil – really goes the extra mile. It is impossible to see the state of Cranston without thinking: “Oh you poor man.” It looks, without exaggeration, absolutely excruciating.
Nevertheless, a special mention has to go to Frankie Muniz, a child actor who long since left the profession to become a racing driver. He gives his performance here his all, tensing and flailing as his carefully built reality comes crashing down around him. The emotional climax of the series is a scene where he finally confronts his mother, and Muniz is a marvel. His eyes water. His face changes colour. Admittedly the fervour of the scene is a little undercut by the constant sounds of diarrhoea in the background (long story) but it goes to show what a rare talent he is, and how badly the acting world has missed him.
On paper, this is it. Malcolm in the Middle has been successfully revived enough to spark viewers into rewatching the original, which in this streaming age is always the intended goal. But surely – surely – everyone involved will have seen the magic they have created here and get to work on a full new series. It’s wonderful that everyone returned at all, but to leave things here would really be unfair.