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Sitting on the bed he has to share with his younger brother Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan) asleep next to him and his older brother Reese (Justin Berfield) sleeping in the bed next to theirs in the room they all have to share, we’re introduced to a precocious child, “My name is Malcolm. You want to know what the best thing about childhood is? At some point, it stops.” Malcolm in the Middle premiered on January 9, 2000. With the new millennium, came a new family comedy, one more honest yet outlandish than the family sitcoms viewers had watched for decades–no laugh track, no sappy group hugs, no sanctimonious moral to impose on its characters and viewers, just chaos, the chaos that comes from having four kids, each wild and rambunctious, and two parents trying to get by on the little money they make from their unglamorous jobs.
As Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) tells Malcolm about the harsh reality of working when he gets his first job, “I’ll tell you what they’re going to pay you, they’re going to pay you what all jobs pay, less than you’re worth and just enough to keep you crawling back for more,” there’s always someone one more powerful than you stepping on your neck, giving you just enough air to breath but not enough to truly flourish. In its seven seasons and 151 episodes, we see Malcolm (Frankie Muniz) and his chaotic, low-wage-earning family try to make ends meet. Malcolm in the Middle creator, Linwood Boomer, based the series on his own life as a gifted kid in a lower-class family, “I remember when I was a kid, grownups always telling me ‘You’re gonna look back on this childhood as the best time of your life,’ and I knew they were lying.”
‘Malcolm in the Middle’ Offered an Honest Look at a Middle-Class Family
The series offered a truer glimpse into the experience of growing up underprivileged in a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer than many of the family sitcoms that came before it and would follow after it. Often families on screen barely talk about money, and certainly not about not having enough of it. Instead, we’re often shown families like in Modern Family depicted as typical middle-class when in actuality they’re upper-middle class mistaking themselves as the economic norm. And Malcolm in the Middle proved to be the anti-7th Heaven, trading in “father knows best” and hyped warnings about the permissive times for screaming kids, antics gone awry, and the only lesson that Malcolm in the Middle tries to impress upon its viewers, which is the last verse of its perfect theme song: “Life is unfair.”
Episode 151: The Final One
After so many episodes inundating Malcolm and his brothers with the harsh reality that life is, indeed, unfair, its final episode aired on May 14, 2006. With the mounting pressure of ending a show, Malcolm in the Middle chose to make its last episode one of life’s great passages: high school graduation. The Wilkerson house is preparing itself for what’s next; Malcolm has been accepted into Harvard; Reese will be moving in with Craig (Anthony David Higgins); and Dewey looks forward to being the oldest boy in the house for once. Hal (Bryan Cranston) is scrambling to get together enough money to pay for Malcolm’s Harvard tuition as he did not receive enough scholarships to get a full ride. Hal even goes to a loan shark as a shady means of trying to procure enough to make up for the shortfall of Malcolm’s tuition. Ironically, the loan shark is played by none other than Linwood Boomer. And in further irony, Hal’s dealing with criminals was prescient for Cranston’s next big role; it had something to do with chemistry and took place in New Mexico, maybe you’ve heard of it.
Reese, a boy who throughout the series was the creator or co-creator of legendary messes, is working as a janitor, cleaning up messes for once. He’s loving his new job but is dispirited when he learns that he’ll be let go at the end of his first 30 days in order for him to avoid union membership. But Reese concocts a plan to create the biggest mess the school has ever seen, so colossal that the school would have to let him stay past the 30 days just to address it. He gathers every disgusting thing he can find–sewage, roadkill, used oil – to create the worst-smelling sludge that he’ll unleash on the school, collecting it all into a steel drum. Guided by his conniving grandmother Ida (Cloris Leachman), they devise a plan to release the sludge during graduation. They hide the steel drum in the back of the van to take with them to the graduation. Meanwhile, Malcolm is writing his valedictorian speech, trying to figure out what it is that he really wants to say. Malcolm’s best friend Stevie (Craig Lamar Traylor) and his father Abe (Gary Anthony Williams) have invited Abe’s successful tech CEO friend over to the Wilkerson house. During lunch, Abe’s friend offerers Malcolm and Stevie high-paying positions at his company in lieu of attending college. Before Malcolm can accept, Lois declines the position for Malcolm insisting that he will go to college.
The family piles into the van–one of those blue ones with the wood paneling, which seemed everywhere in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s–all the while, Malcolm is infuriated with his mom, just as he is about to explode with anger, the steel drum which contains Reese’s foul sludge explodes, the final shenanigan in a series jammed with shenanigans. The family is coated in the gunk and has to wash it off in the yard. It’s then that Malcolm can’t take it anymore, coated in the sludge along with everyone else, he rants about how he hates his life and airs his resentment at his mother for turning down his high-paying job offer, “This is appropriate. Now my life looks exactly how I feel. How could you screw me over like that?” he yells. Lois retorts that Malcolm taking that job would be throwing his life away. He’s destined for something more, but up until then, he didn’t know it.
Finally, the exact reason for Lois rejecting that cushy position for Malcolm is revealed: she couldn’t let him take that job because it would interfere with what it is that he’s meant to do: become the president and one of the best that the country has ever had. When Malcolm hears his mom say that and his family echoes it as if it’s a fact, he’s taken aback. How is he, a poor boy who is currently covered in filth along with his unprivileged family, supposed to become the greatest president there has ever been? But Lois tells him that what matters is that he’d be the first person in that position who’d be able to relate to underprivileged people and understand what it’s like to barely get by, having to work so hard just to stay afloat.
Malcolm Doesn’t Get the Easy Path
Malcolm asks his parents why couldn’t he have just taken the high-paying job and eventually buy his way into the presidency. His parents considered that but decided against it because if he were to ascend into the Oval Office by being rich he wouldn’t be a good president. In order for him to be a good president, he would have to know what it’s like to suffer. Malcolm laments that he’s been suffering all of his life, but Lois counters that it hasn’t been enough. Malcolm doesn’t get to use the easy path and use his genius intelligence to live a suave life of opulent luxury. He’ll go to Harvard and have to work harder than anyone else, taking every opportunity he can get there. For the entire series, Lois has been trying to ingrain life’s harshest lessons onto her sons, but her final lesson is the one that finally resonates:
“You know what it’s like to be poor, and you know what it’s like to work hard. Now you’re going to learn what it’s like to sweep floors and bust your ass and accomplish twice as much as all the kids around you. And it won’t mean anything because they will still look down on you. And you will want so much for them to like you, and they just won’t. And it’ll break your heartland that will make your heart bigger and open your eyes and finally, you will realize that there’s more to life than proving you’re the smartest person in the world. I’m sorry, Malcolm, but you don’t get the easy path. You don’t get to just have fun and be rich and live the life of luxury.”
Malcolm can’t believe what he’s hearing. How do they expect him to be one of the greatest presidents in history? Filled with self-doubt, he’s baffled over the grand plan for his life. But then Lois tells him, “You look me in the eye and tell me you can’t do it.” He’s unable to tell her he can’t.
Cutting to his graduation, the scene is shot aerially with people not wanting to sit around Malcolm and his family. The scene drew parallels with the pilot episode. In the first episode Malcolm says that being smart is like being radioactive, and, sure enough, no one would stand next to him. When Malcolm swayed, the crowd swayed away from him. It’s also revealed that Francis (Christopher Masterson) has taken a cubicle job for a giant corporation, following in the same steps as Hal. Six years later, the last episode finds a tiny detail to connect it with the first. In his graduation speech, Malcolm talks about no matter how far away you get from your family, you’ll always carry traces of them with you; they’re inescapable.
For a show that focused on the chaos of the nuclear family growing up with not a lot, Malcolm in the Middle found a way of ending on a grand note. Throughout the series, Malcolm complains about his suffering without taking into consideration that he’s not the only person in the world suffering, and, finally, his eyes are opened, and he’s becoming the person who will one day be the president.
A Show for Its Era
For almost its entire run, Malcolm in the Middle aired during the George W. Bush presidency. Besides the disastrous Iraq War, Bush’s presidency was also defined by how it encapsulated that being rich and well-connected was enough to become the most powerful person in the world. And unlike, Malcolm, George Walker Bush wasn’t a genius and came from a political dynasty that most certainly did not have to struggle to make ends meet. In many ways, Malcolm in the Middle deeply understood the times it was in, both the micro with a house full of screaming unruly children and unpaid bills to the macro with a White House with an occupant that couldn’t relate to poverty. But it also illuminated to people that the status quo doesn’t have to be accepted. Life is unfair, but we can fight unfairness.
In the first episode, Malcolm, having become tired of the school bully’s tyranny, finally stands up to him in front of everyone. Using his intelligence, he’s able to outmaneuver the bully who accidentally lands a punch on Stevie, who’s in a wheelchair, knocking him over. When the entire class sees what the bully did, they muster the courage to collectively rise against him. With shouting and protest from his peers, his reign of torment is over. Likewise, we can stand up to the bullies in our lives, at an individual level and all the way to society at large, whether that be economic inequality or even the jerk who tries to tear you down. You can say “You’re not the boss of me now, and you’re not so big.”
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