Growing up, I was raised by two families: My own, and the one I sat down every week to watch on Malcolm in the Middle from 2000-2006. My own home life was rather tame, so getting to live in Malcolm’s chaos for a half-hour was always an entertaining foray into a world I would never experience. It also helped that the show was almost unfairly funny and honest in its portrayal of middle-class American life. For many of us growing up with the show, it was easy to pin aspects of our own lives onto these characters and their situations.
Now, twenty years later, that family is back on our screens, and it’s almost like they never went away. They’re the somewhat-distant family you think about and check in on occasionally to see if things are still the same, and knowing that they are loosens a little ball in your chest you didn’t know had formed. The world at large has changed in the last twenty years, but Malcolm, for the most part, hasn’t. And that’s its charm.
