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The intro to the new Malcolm in the Middle is quite the thing. Kids punch police officers. Santa Claus gets kicked in the face. A barrel full of faeces detonates inside a family car. This recap of previous episodes is so full of gross-out comedy and family fights that a grandma grabs her teenage grandson and crushes his testicles until he squeals. “And,” intones a voiceover at its end, “someone actually asked for more of this.”
Did they? It’s been 20 years since the Emmy-winning sitcom about an outrageous working-class US family with the titular child genius went off air. It’s a show whose fans remember it fondly for never dipping in quality throughout its seven seasons. But were they really clamouring for more?
“It was in all the magazines,” says Frankie Muniz, AKA lead character Malcolm. In 2015, he casually tweeted that it would be “so cool” to catch up with the characters and “I couldn’t believe the response. I was shocked.” Although, really, he shouldn’t have been. After all, he’s spent decades getting first-hand experience of how much more loved the show is than he ever dreamed.
“One of the wildest was the first time I went overseas. I had no idea people knew the show there. I was in Geneva, walking with my girlfriend and people were looking. By the end of it, we were literally being chased down the street. When I’m in Europe or I’m in Mexico or in Central America, people love the show so much that … I’m not comparing myself to the Beatles at all, but it almost was that odd level of ‘What is happening?’”
Fans should be happy. The rebooted Malcolm in the Middle (subtitled Life’s Still Unfair, after the theme tune lyrics) is every bit the laugh-out-loud pleasure that the original was. The four half-hour episodes – which reunite the original cast for parents Lois and Hal’s 40th wedding anniversary celebration – are full of killer gags, surreal humour and OTT family showdowns ranging from siblings calling the tax office on each other to Malcolm attempting to win an argument about not being stuck up by keying his own car. It’s a comedic joy.
And it would never have been made without one man. The series really came to be following a conversation Muniz had shortly after that tweet. “I had dinner with Bryan and I remember him saying something like: ‘There’s no role I’d want to revisit more than Hal,’ so he took the lead. It’s thanks to Bryan that it really did happen.”
That, just to be clear, is Bryan Cranston. AKA the star of Breaking Bad, widely regarded as one of the greatest TV shows of all time. He won the Emmy for outstanding lead actor four times in five seasons, creating one of the finest performances ever committed to screen. Is it not surprising that the one role he’s keenest to reprise is a goofball dad with a penchant for stumbling into ludicrous slapstick scenarios?
“I think it’s because he’s been murdering so many people on other shows,” laughs Jane Kaczmarek, who plays Malcolm’s mother, Lois. “He’s like, wow, I can go back and be Hal again?”
The opportunity to have fun certainly isn’t one that Cranston wastes in the new episodes. He performs a full-on choreographed dance routine in a supermarket aisle. He attempts to microdose, accidentally takes enough hallucinogens for 15 elephants and ends up imagining himself as Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, replete with thigh-high leather boots. He is repeatedly naked, including a callback to Hal’s habit of stripping down so Lois can shave off his excess body hair while his kids watch on in horror.
“Taking my clothes off seems to be my whole life,” laughs Cranston – who recently won an Emmy for appearing in an episode of Seth Rogen comedy The Studio, in which he wore a leopardskin thong. “I thought a nudity clause meant that it was circumspect as to when someone was going to be naked. I didn’t know my agent viewed a nudity clause as ‘nudity is essential’. So here I am, a 70-year-old man parading around in his skivvies – or less.”
Cranston’s all-or-nothing approach won’t exactly shock fans of the original Malcolm in the Middle. As far as he was concerned, the more extreme his commitment, the funnier the joke.
“I can’t even recall all the things that I’ve done, but all in the name of comedy, man. You gotta go for it,” he says. “I was covered in blue paint. I was tied to the front of a city bus. I had 60,000 honey bees all over me – I got stung in my crotch. In one episode I had to drink a concoction of raw meat and eggs.”
You had to?
“Yeah, of course I did. Because I wanted to. Because I know the audience would wonder if I really did it. So in the same shot that I’m cracking eggs, putting raw meat in, and blending, I start drinking it.”
And this is the role you were desperate to do over?
“It was seven great years of my life – in which I met the most wonderful people. There’s no better job than going to work and thinking of how to be funny.”
The intervening years have taken the cast in very different directions. Kaczmarek took a hiatus from acting, as “my life went topsy-turvy. I got divorced shortly after the show ended and had three kids that I really wanted to raise.” Erik Per Sullivan, who played Malcolm’s younger brother Dewey, is currently studying for a master’s degree at Harvard – and is the only member of the original family to be recast (Kaczmarek: “He’s studying Dickens and is an incredible student – they offered him buckets of money to come back, and he just said: ‘No thank you’.”) Muniz threw himself into alternative ventures, from becoming a professional racing driver to running an olive oil shop with his wife in which he “was personally filling 600 bottles a day – because I want to make sure everything’s perfect”. The latter came as no surprise to the cast.
“I remember him saying once in the makeup chair he was thinking about buying warehouses in Australia,” laughs Kaczmarek. “And I thought, what 16-year-old kid is thinking about buying a warehouse? He was a good kid. He didn’t drink. He didn’t do drugs. He was a real straight arrow.”
Given that some of them stepped away from acting, you can’t help but wonder whether it felt odd to be back on screen. Especially given that one of them became quite possibly the greatest actor of his generation.
“I think Bryan was more nervous to work with me again,” laughs Muniz. “I wasn’t intimidated to work with him, because he’s always just been such an amazing guy to me. Throughout all the success he’s had, he’s always been there to support whatever I’m doing. When I had the olive oil company, he bought the olive oil. I was in a band, and he came to the shows. When I was racing, he checked on me after a wreck. I was just excited to spend more time with him.”
This is a vibe that comes across pretty clearly in the show. To see the cast back together is to marvel at chemistry that is somehow every bit as vigorous after two decades apart. Second child Reese (Justin Berfield) steals scenes with his hilariously malevolent rivalry with Malcolm and non-binary sibling Kelly (the one new addition to the cast, as Lois was pregnant with them in the original run, played by Vaughan Murrae). Eldest son Francis’s (Christopher Kennedy Masterson) manic – and futile – determination to be the apple of his mother’s eye is still hilarious (“Mom … I’m senior management. I have 75 people under me.” “That’s 75 people plotting to replace you!”).
It’s exactly the slice of joy the world needs right now. Did the team ever feel like helping to bring some laughter into people’s lives was a public service given how dark the world feels?
“Comedy is essential right now. It’s not even important. It’s essential,” says Cranston. “Because it’s a break from the bombardment of non-stop information. People who have the news on 24 hours a day in their homes, I don’t think they realise the damage they’re doing. You might as well make a house full of asbestos or just have radiation constantly emitting through your house.”
There is one thing about bringing the show back that doesn’t feel quite right, though. When the original run wanted to prove Lois’s unshakeable belief in Malcolm, it ended with her telling him he could be the greatest person on the planet – the US president.
“God, who would want to do that now?” says Kaczmarek. “Talk about unfair: look who we got as president. If only Lois had raised Donald Trump, she could have put a couple of good kicks up his backside.”
Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair is on Disney+ on 10 April.
