TV review
Family reunions, even when you love the people there, can always be a bit of a mixed bag.
For every nice moment you may have reconnecting, there are likely to be just as many, if not more, painful reminders of why some parts of your upbringing are best left in the rearview mirror. Such is the case with the misfire that is “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair.”
Both oddly belabored and slapdash, this four-part event miniseries picks up years after the early 2000s sitcom about a dysfunctional American family came to what should have been its close. Alas, nothing can ever stay concluded as the remakes, reboots and revivals will seemingly continue until morale improves.
This one is by no means the worst offender, as it brings some absurd jokes and gags that make you sit up a bit when it lets them play out. Unfortunately, the rest of the experience is defined by increasingly empty callbacks, a rushed storyline and a forced sentimentality that ends up smothering its more scathing wisecracks. It brings back nearly all the original cast, including the actor-turned-NASCAR racer Frankie Muniz as the titular Malcolm, but is never able to fully recapture the comedic spark that the original series consistently had. Save for Bryan Cranston baring all as the family’s maniacal and insecure patriarch, it’s less an engaging revival than a tiresome dragging out of a television corpse. It’s still got good bones, but there’s something unshakably sad about seeing them flung around in a way almost entirely devoid of life.
This is felt from the very opening when we see a quick “Previously on” montage of the original show that captures how chaotic, crass and ultimately creative it could be. When we then hear narration from Cranston, saying, “And someone actually asked for more of this,” it’s a good joke — yet it speaks to a prevailing insecurity the revival is never able to get free of. It seems to be trying to convince us that this is really what we all wanted. But if the “someone” who asked for more is a reference to the audience who loved the original show, it’s certainly likely they would have asked for far more than what this offers.
We then get taken through a quick update on where Malcolm is now, which involves Muniz speaking to the camera as his younger self did, but with very little of the same charm. We learn how he’s largely cut himself off from his family, raising his own daughter (Keeley Karsten) as a single father and also building a relationship with his girlfriend (Kiana Madeira). It all provides a painfully broad sense of how everything and nothing has changed.
The most painful change? How bland everything looks. Everything from the ugly IKEA-esque production design to the flat way it’s shot makes it feel as if we’ve wandered into one of those cartoonishly bad immersive experiences a la the Willy Wonka one that gained attention for how cheap it looked. The show makes the critical mistake of showing us early on how the original living room looked before dropping us into the lifeless imitation that we’ll now spend this one trapped in. Never once does the home seem like a real place that any of these characters actually lives in. Malcolm’s home and office are even worse, creating a growing sense that we’re watching the “SNL” parody of “Malcolm in the Middle” rather than a meaningful expansion on where the original left off. For every moment you may chuckle, there are many more where you can’t help cringing at how off everything feels. Save for the performance of Cranston, who really kicks everything up a notch in one standout drug trip sequence, it’s all agonizingly square.
By the time the inevitable happens, in which the characters get brought under the same roof for one final reunion, it all just feels tired. It’s only four episodes, but it ends up seeming like the show had both completely run out of steam and was only barely getting started. Neither the old characters nor the new ones are well-served by a story that barely hangs together, making something like the much-maligned “Arrested Development” revival look like a misunderstood masterpiece by comparison.
But hey, at least it lives up to its title. Life is indeed still unfair in that nothing is sacred. No matter what show you once loved or what characters you still remember fondly, nothing is above being dragged out for a shameless attempt at exploiting your nostalgia. There will always be another reunion that makes you wish you’d never gone in the first place.
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