Checking in with the Nolastname family 20 years later, Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair is another nail in Hollywood’s coffin of new ideas. But with original series creator Linwood Boomer back at the helm and the majority of the main cast dutifully reprising their roles, this revival proves to be a welcome coda to the Y2K hit with a (mostly) satisfying blend of sweetness, thoughtful character work, and good old-fashioned hijinks.
Malcolm in the Middle was something of a unicorn when it premiered in 2000. Like The Simpsons or Roseanne, it was a comedy for both kids and adults that centered on a charming yet dysfunctional lower-middle-class family. But its off-kilter combination of an almost cartoonish visual style with a hard-bitten perspective on how downright excruciating growing up can be gave the series a distinct, subversive edge.
Comprised of four half-hour installments—the limited series feels more akin to a TV movie split into parts than a full-fledged reboot—Life’s Still Unfair drops us into Malcolm’s (Frankie Muniz) in the present day, where he’s a modestly successful nonprofit executive and devoted single father to Leah (Keeley Karsten), a brilliant but socially maladjusted teenager.
As he tells us in trademark fourth-wall-breaking style, everything is going great in Malcolm’s life—as long as he stays as far away from his family as possible. This plan, as you can imagine, doesn’t hold out for long, as Hal (Bryan Cranston) and Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) don’t take kindly to his declining the invite to their 40th-anniversary party.
Despite everyone sporting more wrinkles and gray hairs, the family has hardly matured. Reese (Justin Berfield) is the lovable doofus he’s always been, Dewey (Caleb Ellsworth-Clark, stepping in for Erik Per Sullivan) is a womanizing classical musician on a world tour (he appears predominantly via Zoom), while Francis (Christopher Kennedy Masterson) and Piama (Emy Coligado) have their own surprise announcement to make.
The largely expositional first episode is by far the shakiest. Within the first three minutes, the show’s more saturated color grading, the fact that the central house’s notoriously derelict front lawn has been mowed and manicured with fresh flowers, and an out-of-character pronoun joke (the tacky go-to device that uses trans people as a punchline for situating older characters in the modern world) all raise alarm bells about whether the revival traded in the original’s singularity for some Disneyfied piece of nostalgia brainrot.
Thankfully, the series justifies its existence by doing what Malcolm in the Middle always did so well: give its characters some injustice to fight about, and watch them try to come out the other end of it a little stronger. Once we get through the “where are they now” section, it’s just as fun—and laugh-out-loud funny—as ever to watch Malcolm revert to being the dumbest genius in the room, Lois attempt to control her family of hooligans, and Hal, well, go on a typical Hal adventure, such as battling his evil twin during a psychedelic mushroom trip.
Half the trouble with these types of reboots lies in how they integrate new characters into a dynamic that had been molded over the original show’s run. Leah, Malcolm’s girlfriend Tristan (Kiana Madeira), and Hal and Lois’s youngest, Kelly (Vaughan Murrae), are by and large serviceable additions. But they nonetheless feel too subdued for the world of the series.
This wouldn’t be an issue if the season were longer, but since Hulu has dubbed the series a “special event” and the fourth episode wraps up the narrative in ways that suggest we shouldn’t expect a follow-up season anytime soon. As a brief but spirited revival, though, Life’s Still Unfair is a worthwhile reunion with one of TV’s most perfectly imperfect families. You’re not the boss of me, nostalgia—but you get a pass this time.
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