Malcolm in the Middle Retrospective | Life is Unfair

every decade there was a series that define that era and encapsulated the feeling of that timeframe the 70s had mash in The Muppet Show the 80s had cheers and the dukes of hazzard in the 90s there was Seinfeld and The Simpsons and the early 2000s had malcolm in the middle' for those who might not be in the know airing between January 2008 2006 on the Fox Network Malcolm in the middle was a sitcom about a lower middle class American family focusing mainly on the middle child Malcolm and the general misery of his day-to-day life growing up as a child genius between repeat Simpsons reruns and hiding my late-night anime viewings from everyone around me like the filthy degenerate I am Malcolm was one of the shows I watched a lot growing up as the Wilkerson family yes that's what their name was we're probably one of the few families on TV that felt truly genuine in a way no other show did at the time and I clearly wasn't the only one who felt this way either as the show was a huge success early on being one of Fox's most viewed series when it first aired possibly even helping the save the network when it was bogged down by a slew of failed sitcoms poorly aging series and bad reality TV going back to it now you can kind of see why that was though as malcolm in the middle' represented a major shift in live-action sitcoms at the turn of the century but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves on that one so since I recently did a video about a popular anime series and an hour long breakdown of an over-the-top action game let's talk about a live-action sitcom from almost two decades ago because what's a consistent brand but because literally no one else is talking about it why the hell not I get to plant my tiny little flag on this untouched virgin soil before some poor sighted wolf tries to come in on it so sit back relax and let's dive into what need mouths in the middle so popular and maybe why that stalls so as always a bit of context before we get into the details you see in the 90s wall shows like The Simpsons and friends being the biggest thing ever at the time might make you think otherwise classic situational comedies were getting more and more tired as the decade went on for every major success like Seinfeld there was a slew of mediocre forgotten ones that didn't make it to season two like daddy dearest George buddies Charlie Hoover getting by that's life the trouble with Larry home boys in outer space and Heil honey I'm home which yeah the 90s were a wild time so going into the 2000s after the incredibly subversive Simpsons of the last decade that turned its nose at the very idea of them if you were planning on pitching a sitcom it needed more than just an outlandish premise to stand any chance of surviving the mid-season sweeps which brings us to Linwood boomer haven't been working in Hollywood since his early 20s acting in Little House on the Prairie in the late 70s boomer was known most for his behind-the-scenes work as a writer and producer on shows like townies third Rock from the Sun and the red letter media famous Night Court you're not going anywhere until you fix these VCRs so I can watch my Night Court tape I've been waiting since 20 2012 10 while not having the largest career pedigree in Hollywood boomer was a regular in a lot of writers rooms where he would often entertain other writers with the stories of his childhood as a gifted student in a lower achieving family where he would tell the principal he was stupid his mom would often walk around the house topless while doing laundry and his hairy dad would get shaved out in the kitchen before breakfast it was those stories that boomer would then use when he decided to write up his own spec script which would then become malcolm in the middle' pilot at the time most sitcoms in the 90s were about middle upper-class family men and their quirky friends and relatives or teenagers in their zany school lives where at the end of each week's episode all of the day's problems would work out with a nice bow on it to tie it all together so Malcolm the middle from the start was already a major deviation as it was written to be loosely based on boomers experience growing up in a lower middle class family that struggled to make ends meet and because of that was approached with a slightly more cynical but realistic attitude to what life in America was like the mom worked at a frustrating full-time job at a drugstore because it was the only one that could accommodate her kids schedule the dad was working some dead-end off his job that he had no passion for the oldest son was sent to military school for being a delinquent and the three other brothers went to an underfunded public school with Malcolm only getting a proper education because he was found out to be a genius which ends up with him getting ostracized for being a nerd despite being yet another show about two middle-aged parents and their kids there wasn't a lot of shows like malcolm in the middle' score premise because it was so different and unique though many studios were certain it would flop when it was being pitched around by Gale Berman at Regency TV thinking audiences wouldn't want to see something so real not even being interested in funding a test pilot but then new and short-lived president Fox Studios Doug Herzog ended up reading over the pitch and thought there was a lot of potential in the pilot script so he decided to give them a shot from there after casting the main actors such as 14-year old Frankie Muniz for the main role of Malcolm and bringing in Todd Holland to direct they started working on the main pilot of the show and then after getting the okay from Herzog upon seeing the finished work who basically ignored the test audiences lukewarm feelings on it because he thought it was funny the first season now while this might seem reckless in retrospect you have to understand that Herzog and the Fox studio were in desperate need of something to shake up the low ratings they were getting on their network and saw Malcolm as being exactly what they needed putting a lot of their eggs into that basket because of it to the point of airing it right after the Simpsons their highest viewed show and pushing a huge marketing campaign for its premiere but their gamble ended up paying off immensely we malcom the middle becoming an instant success when it first aired coming out of the punk anti-establishment air of the 90s moving into the post y2k age malcolm in the middle' was basically this perfect distilment of American attitudes of that era and its changing perspective on what a modern family was like giving it this Nietzsche esque life is suffering learn to live with it philosophy which appealed to a lot of audiences well the first season had some growing pains will figure itself out the show definitely had a unique and fresh style to it and that roughness if anything ultimately added to the general tone and grittiness of the show early on as it was designed to basically be a twist on every convention of the clean cut modern sitcoms at the time to start it was shot from a single camera perspective allowing for more dynamic cinematography being able to move around more freely with its shots meaning less static flat sets and locations like the family home felt genuinely lived in because every angle of it could be viewed which longtime fans could probably walk through by memory because of it now this might sound like fairly standard stuff tad in this telefilm ins been a part of our long dramas for years but those kind of practices were extremely uncommon for traditional sitcoms which were filmed from multiple angles at once and didn't have a lot of post-production by comparison making them much easier to produce which is why Malcolm ended up costing a lot of money to make since it was shot more like a film even using film reels over digital video while it was more expensive and time consuming to film this more cinematic shooting style also meant way more freedom for lighting and visual effect tricks along with having the ability to do more experimental editing styles like the episode where there was two parallel stories occurring at the same time that showed would it be like if each parent took the kids out for a bowling party along with this style filming the creators also chose not to use a proper laugh track like nearly every sitcom of the last century being one of the first few American sitcoms that did away with it and replaced it with mood setting background now I'm not gonna take it out on shows they use can laughter because some amazing shows used it as well especially twenty years ago when it was an industry standard but removing the laugh track allowed for Malcolm to maintain its realistic tone and payson rather than having the characters pause every few seconds to let you have a chuckle this is important because the humor of the show just wouldn't work with a laugh track either because it's less haha set up and pay off on you like friends or Seinfeld and more rooted in this schadenfreude type of humor where it's coming from the general humiliation of the characters or the misery they caused others with a lot of the jokes coming from Malcolm or the other characters being put through worse and worse situations just trying to make it through the day it would feel almost cruel having a laugh track added in because at the end of the day the reason why a lot of this is funny is that it's incredibly relatable in a personal way for example one of my favorite scenes is in the episode where Hal temporarily leaves his job to work on his dream work of art because I know exactly what this feeling is like you get a sense of relief seeing others deal with the same problems you might have encountered either as a kid or as a parent and adding in a laugh track ignoring how obnoxious it would be would just feel wrong in a way it's also worth mentioning how important the casting of the main family was to the show too as the actors chosen each fit their roles perfectly with probably the biggest a node being Hal played by then semi-famous character actor Bryan Cranston prior to acting in that other show well a lot of people were perplexed when they first heard Cranston was doing serious roles like Breaking Bad when it first started airing as he become typecast as this hyperactive goofball looking at Malcolm in retrospect you can actually see how versatile he always was as an actor and how he could be this hyper scale thespian we know too as the show went on Cranston ended up being the comedy workhorse for the series as he had easily the widest range being able to manically bounce from soft and subtle moments to insanely over-the-top it's that adaptability you vet also ended up mixing well with his on-screen wife Lois creating this great chemistry between the two that made them stand out as TV parents especially with how they were framed well you add hell is this overgrown manchild who's hypersensitive to everything around him Lois ruled the house with an iron fist essentially playing the antagonist to the brothers but while Lois always came off as more or less the villain of the show to me growing up spending most first screen time screaming at her kids as the years went on I started to realize that she was just a genuinely caring parent that wanted the best for her children a realization I think most people might have felt about their parents once they were no longer little gremlins themselves sure she expressed in the most extreme ways possible acting erratically because of it but in the end it did come from a place of loving concern for her kids well-being though it's this behavior that ended up shaping Lois and her oldest son Francis's dynamic together to where the rest the kids resented her and felt she was out to get them yet still cared for her Francis ended up developing a victim complex toward his mother believing every single problem was because of Lois even for things he did to himself and his overall arc throughout the series is getting at the point that he takes ownership for his own faults rather than continually blaming his mother for everything that's happened to him though he still maintained an antagonistic relationship with her to the very end with no real moment of them coming together like the other brothers did actually that's something else that stood out about Malcolm as a show as the series went on while it maintained a certain status quo there was a sense of character progression as the years went on especially with the brothers since the show runners couldn't exactly stop the kids from aging at least legally the fact they were growing up became a central aspect to the show starting with Malcolm in junior high and ending with him graduating from high school going into college with each season representing a full year so as the show went on we would see the kids have their own little mini arks that they had to go through like reefs getting cheated on by his girlfriend with Malcolm and in his pain ends up joining the Army or malkos friend Stevi going through his mother abandoning him and his father and the emotional turmoil that causes them there was an honesty to the way the show framed Malcolm and the rest adolescent problems that were often dolled up in other media when he went through his first heartbreak Malcolm had a huge public outburst and when he started to go through puberty and began having feelings of existential dread he just wants to spend all his days in bed and if that isn't relatable I don't know what else is but probably the character that grew the most was easily the youngest brother Dewey first starting off is the naive adorable but ultimately weird brother that doesn't really understand social norms over the course of six years you actually get to see them become a fully developed person since the writers can keep him as the cute one forever they started to give them a more defined personality having him develop a love of playing music and becoming more perceptive to what's going on around him more often than not getting the one-up on his brothers due to learning from their mistakes it's because of this the Dewey ends up becoming the most emotionally mature of the family to the point of selflessly staying in this special needs class that Malcolm got him put into by mistake because he understands that the other kids there desperately need him since the teachers there don't give them the attention that could help them enact that none of his other family members would ever consider doing well it maintain its core premise the characters did gradually develop as they aged but while seeing them grow up and start to feel like their own people did add to what the show was it's that gradual shift to the characters and its perspective that might have also been where Malcolm the middle started to show some cracks while Malcolm in the middle was a huge success when it first aired as the series went on with each season viewership dropped by the millions in a way that no other sitcoms of the era did season one started off with a record high of a 50 million fewer average in the first few episodes being in the 20 million range eclipsing even the Simpsons at the time fast forward six years though and the final season was a fifth of that becoming Fox's lowest rated long-running show in 2005 and itself being eclipsed by newer series like the war at home which considering its choices and actors was a little awkward this very well could be explained as the series fatigue that naturally happens to a lot of shows eventually audiences just start to lose interest but this kind of steep decline going from season 1 to 7 might be indicative of other smaller problems this series was having by the end that wall not exclusively show ruining individually all began to pile up to start while Malcolm always had it's surreal elements to be sure as the years went on the absurdity of it began to increase more and more when you compare the first few seasons to the last few there was a big escalation to the stories and characters the show is no longer as much about problems rooted in real relatable family issues as much as the crazy situations the family would get into you had storylines where Louis went all the way to Afghanistan to fetch Reese when he deserted the army idol losing a leg after its run over by a semi which do we then track down only to have a dog steal it how becoming the leader of a group of bodybuilders Dewey's special needs class living in the trees for a week Malcolm finding a man who's lived in the Lockheed for years and Stevie Manning a mech to fight Reese so you want a realistic down-to-earth show that's completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots also while using the kids growing up was a good way of framing its story the brothers started to lose their charm once they got into high school you know like real life it's around this time that Malcolm is a character became flandres turning him from a cute but snarky junior high kid learning about how the world works and sometimes getting into trouble by lipping off to the wrong person to an extremely snobbish high schooler which could very well work and admittedly dozen places but there's a lack of the understanding relatable side that his younger self had leaving just an obnoxious mean-spirited attitude that made him more into his brother Reese than the original Malcolm that viewers liked I know one could argue this is basically portraying how turbulent puberty can be but seeing Malcolm get called out for being a pessimistic narcissists nearly every other episode starts to feel like Malcolm just isn't developing as he's basically learning the same lesson over and over again on the flip side of that where Malcolm essentially stagnates into a frustrating character by the latter part of the show family members like Reese and Louis started to mellow out as we saw their characters developed and the writers better figure than out but we'll put a tiny pin in that for now speaking of stagnation though probably the most common sign of a sitcom start to Plateau is adding new characters into the main cast in an attempt to boost interest again which brings us to the fifth child Jaime now every fan you'll talk to has their own jumping the shark moment when malcolm in the middle' started to lose them if at all but Jaime being born seems to be more or less the most consistent time frame for when a lot of people's interest in the show started to waver which seems to correlate with the significant drop in viewers going into the later seasons this storyline most likely came from Kazmir real-life pregnancy during the filming of the fourth season with the writers incorporating it into the show rather than working around it with big sweaters and handbags like miniseries do but like nearly every baby in sitcoms Jaime added pretty much nothing with how he was implemented he is purely a destructive force that's used to build conflict round we had already seen the kids run Louis up the wall as they grew up so seeing it repeated with a newborn with no personality attached to it wasn't exactly captivating maybe having him be born as the only girl of the kids would have helped to mix things up a bit but even then I don't think that would have been a fix overall effectively Jamie being born at the end of season four is the marker for when the quote-unquote classic season stops and the later seasons that many people feel mixed about begins however Jamie wasn't the only issue with how the cast was handled by the end of the show and this brings us to Francis as I mentioned earlier being the brother sent away at the start of the series Francis got his own little story Alliance separate from the rest of the family starting off in military school where he was constantly causing trouble then emancipating himself before going to work in Alaska where he got into a brush marriage but once he got to the grotto at the start of season four he was forced to become a bit more mature and better at running his life there is still the old reckless Francis there but having to help run a poorly managed dude ranch starts to shape him up by the later seasons though by the last two years of the show Francis's progression ended up hitting this brick wall well it was never confirmed why this was this was more than likely due to his actor Christopher Masterson having other projects that he was working on at the time that took priority but the character just started appearing less and less in the later seasons going from appearing in nearly every episode from season 1 to 5 to only appearing six times in season six and four times in season seven because he wasn't making any more regular appearances his art going from teenage delinquent to when actual responsible adults basically halted getting abruptly fired from his ranch hand job in a throwaway line having a few episodes of him bumming around unemployed and then a one-off explanation in the final episode that he got a dead-end office job like his dad Francis was never the most pivotal character mostly existing to facilitate B plots entirely separate from the a plot but for how much development and attention Malcolm gave to its main characters it's disappointing seeing one of its main cast just fading into the background for little to no reason despite its problems and flaner ization though I definitely won't say that the later seasons are terrible these are simply explanations as to why it served to lose viewership in such a significant way if I'm being honest you could put on nearly any episode from any season and I personally as there are still amazing episodes in the last couple seasons that do a great job of characterizing the family while keeping to the core theme of the series personally one of my favorite episodes of the show is in the final season with the episode Louis Strikes Back where Rhys is publicly humiliated by a group of popular high school girls leaving him utterly devastated and Louis decides to enact her own form of pure vengeance on the girls to make them pay for it after realizing how far she's gone though going so far as to frame an innocent kid on the street when she's nearly caught she admits that she isn't any better than how Rhys acts and that he likely got that reckless behavior from her which she probably got from her mother to which she deeply apologizes displayed the show regularly framing Reece and Louis as bitter enemies you get a real genuine scene between them that shows that they both care for and understand each other with easily the best acting job Jing Kazmir did in the entire show because of how honest her monologue feels however because of the continuing lower ratings and the fact it cost significantly more to produce than your average half-hour sitcom Fox chose to end Malcolm in the middle at the seventh season which wasn't announced until halfway through it when it was bounced back to airing on Sunday evenings after being pushed to Friday nights possibly to give the series a proper farewell after all this time the writers also probably saw the writing on the wall too as they wrote the last half of the season with this feeling of finality to it knowing that recent Malcolm graduating would be the moment where the family would start to get broken up making for a perfect place to wrap it all up with their graduation even having Linwood boomer who stepped down his executive producer the show to a creative consultant on the final season to come in to direct the series finale for some of its shakiness in the end the series was able to save itself from having a problem many other shows fall into and that's being able to end on a strong note before it completely overstate its welcome and perfectly encapsulated the overall message of the series in one of its final scenes you know what it's like to be poor and you know what it's like to work hard now you're gonna learn what it's like to sweep floors and bust your ass and accomplish twice as much as all the kids around you and I won't mean anything because they will still look down on you well let's not talks about a lot anymore when looking at what came before and after it malcolm in the middle' represented this shift that started to happen in the 2000s with sitcoms like Arrested Development and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia which were less about teaching more lessons as they were about depicting real life and how ugly and frustrating it can actually be which was refreshing admittedly some jokes and topics haven't aged incredibly well but Malcolm still feels especially relevant to today for a lot of people 13 years after went off the air because it reflects what life is really like everyone has had that feeling that no matter how much they struggle something is always gonna come and kick them down and that feeling is what malcolm in the middle' is built off of life is unfair but that's why you have to keep fighting in the hopes that everything will work out in the end anyway that's all for today thanks for putting up with my sporadic choices and topics I genuinely appreciate it and an extra special thanks to my awesome supporters over a patreon as they help this channel grow next up judgment AKA judge eyes will private detective Yagami be able to catch the serial killer on the loose in Chamorro Cho as he attempts to make up for his past mistakes stay tuned to find out [Music]

Channel: Foxcade

Views: 2,263,477

Rating: 4.9211354 out of 5

Keywords: Malcolm in the Middle, Fox Studio, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Foxcade, Retrospective, Analysis, Sitcom, Television, Malcolm, Dewey, Hal, Lois, Reese, Francis, Franky Muniz, Bryan Cranston, The Simpsons, Friends, Seinfeld, 90's Sitcom, Linwood Boomer, Review

Id: TRgAfvzHdT8

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/MagentaLove]

Hal has always been my favorite, Bryan Cranston did such an amazing job, He has so much range.

[u/littlezeekers]

I know how unpopular Louis is, but she is my absolute favorite character. Definitely the antagonist to the boys and sometimes a little irrational but she is portrayed so well by Jane Kaczmarek. She used to scare me as a child but as an adult I adore her and her explosive personality.

[u/YOUREABOT]

Malcom was actually my least favorite character in all the seasons. I loved how the other characters became better. This show is still impressive. The fighting is so real between family members.

[u/dudewhodoesnothing]

Nice RLM reference.

[u/creekrats22]

So On Point! It was very clear (to me) early in this series that Hal was the character to build around.

[u/egmoneyy]

That was awesome

[u/chill_in]

I watched this video a few days ago and have since binged the first season. Absolutely phenomenal. The ckmedy still holds up today and doesn't really feel like its aged too much. I love the fact there is no laugh track.

[u/[deleted]]

I fucking love this show