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Malcolm in the Middle
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Malcolm in the Middle
Malcolm in the Middle is an American television sitcom created by Linwood Boomer for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series premiered on January 9, 2000, and ended on May 14, 2006, after seven seasons consisting of 151 episodes.
The single-camera series is a comedy that follows a dysfunctional middle-class family and stars Frankie Muniz in the lead role as Malcolm, a child prodigy. The ensemble cast includes Jane Kaczmarek and Bryan Cranston as Malcolm's parents, Lois and Hal. Christopher Kennedy Masterson, Justin Berfield, and Erik Per Sullivan appear as Malcolm's brothers, Francis, Reese, and Dewey, respectively. Typical plots revolve around the family's dysfunctional relationships and inability to fit into society, with Malcolm regularly making asides to the camera to comment on their failures. Another brother, Jamie (James and Lukas Rodriguez), was introduced as the fifth son of Hal and Lois at the end of season four, with a further pregnancy in the series finale alluding to a sixth child.
Malcolm in the Middle was produced by Satin City and Regency Television in association with Fox Television Studios. The show has been syndicated worldwide, and received widespread critical acclaim and proved a popular draw for Fox. It is placed on several lists of the greatest TV and sitcom series of all time. It has won a Peabody Award, seven Emmy Awards, one Grammy Award and seven Golden Globe nominations. The show was influential as one of the first single-camera comedy series on TV without a live studio audience or laugh track.
A four-episode revival Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair is being produced for Disney+, with Caleb Ellsworth-Clark and Anthony Timpano respectively replacing Sullivan and the Rodriguez brothers as Dewey and Jamie.
The series revolves around Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), who's revealed in the first episode to be a genius with an IQ of 165, which places him in a class for gifted students (also known as "Krelboynes"), originally taught by Caroline Miller (Catherine Lloyd Burns). He is the third-born child in a comically dysfunctional family of four (later five) boys, of Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) and Hal (Bryan Cranston). As of the first season, their delinquent oldest child Francis (Christopher Kennedy Masterson) has been sent away to military school; while his brothers Reese (Justin Berfield) and Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan) remain at home with Malcolm and their parents. With Francis away, Malcolm becomes the middle child of the family. In season four, the character Jamie (James and Lukas Rodriguez) was added to the show as the fifth son of Hal and Lois. The show's early seasons centered on Malcolm dealing with the rigors of being an intellectual and enduring the eccentricities of family life.
Later seasons expanded the show's scope by exploring the family's interactions with their extended family, friends and colleagues in more depth, including Lois' tyrannical mother Ida (Cloris Leachman); Lois' hapless coworker at the Lucky Aide drugstore Craig Feldspar (David Anthony Higgins); Malcolm's best friend Stevie Kenarban (Craig Lamar Traylor), who is both a wheelchair user and highly asthmatic; and Stevie's dad Abe (Gary Anthony Williams), as well as a series of continuing subplots detailing Francis' misadventures at the military academy, from which he subsequently disenrolls to work in an Alaskan logging camp, before finally landing a job on a dude ranch run by an eccentric German couple.
The series differed significantly from the standard TV sitcom presentation commonplace at the time. Malcolm routinely broke the fourth wall by both narrating in voice-over and talking directly to the viewer on camera. The distinctive look and sound of the series relied heavily on elaborate post-production, including fast-cut editing, sound effects, musical inserts, the extensive use of locations, and the unusual camera styles, compositions and effects (e.g. overhead, tracking, hand-held and crane shots, and the frequent use of a wide-angle lens for both close-ups and ensemble scenes) that would be generally impractical or impossible to achieve in a standard studio-based video multi-camera sitcom production. The show employed neither a laugh track (which was standard in other TV sitcoms) nor a live studio audience. Emulating the style of hour-long dramas, this half-hour show was shot on film instead of on video.[clarification needed]
Another distinctive aspect of the show is that the cold open of nearly every episode is unrelated to the main story. Exceptions include episodes which were the conclusions of "two-parters"; each part two episode opened with a recap of its part one episode.
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Malcolm in the Middle
Malcolm in the Middle is an American television sitcom created by Linwood Boomer for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series premiered on January 9, 2000, and ended on May 14, 2006, after seven seasons consisting of 151 episodes.
The single-camera series is a comedy that follows a dysfunctional middle-class family and stars Frankie Muniz in the lead role as Malcolm, a child prodigy. The ensemble cast includes Jane Kaczmarek and Bryan Cranston as Malcolm's parents, Lois and Hal. Christopher Kennedy Masterson, Justin Berfield, and Erik Per Sullivan appear as Malcolm's brothers, Francis, Reese, and Dewey, respectively. Typical plots revolve around the family's dysfunctional relationships and inability to fit into society, with Malcolm regularly making asides to the camera to comment on their failures. Another brother, Jamie (James and Lukas Rodriguez), was introduced as the fifth son of Hal and Lois at the end of season four, with a further pregnancy in the series finale alluding to a sixth child.
Malcolm in the Middle was produced by Satin City and Regency Television in association with Fox Television Studios. The show has been syndicated worldwide, and received widespread critical acclaim and proved a popular draw for Fox. It is placed on several lists of the greatest TV and sitcom series of all time. It has won a Peabody Award, seven Emmy Awards, one Grammy Award and seven Golden Globe nominations. The show was influential as one of the first single-camera comedy series on TV without a live studio audience or laugh track.
A four-episode revival Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair is being produced for Disney+, with Caleb Ellsworth-Clark and Anthony Timpano respectively replacing Sullivan and the Rodriguez brothers as Dewey and Jamie.
The series revolves around Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), who's revealed in the first episode to be a genius with an IQ of 165, which places him in a class for gifted students (also known as "Krelboynes"), originally taught by Caroline Miller (Catherine Lloyd Burns). He is the third-born child in a comically dysfunctional family of four (later five) boys, of Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) and Hal (Bryan Cranston). As of the first season, their delinquent oldest child Francis (Christopher Kennedy Masterson) has been sent away to military school; while his brothers Reese (Justin Berfield) and Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan) remain at home with Malcolm and their parents. With Francis away, Malcolm becomes the middle child of the family. In season four, the character Jamie (James and Lukas Rodriguez) was added to the show as the fifth son of Hal and Lois. The show's early seasons centered on Malcolm dealing with the rigors of being an intellectual and enduring the eccentricities of family life.
Later seasons expanded the show's scope by exploring the family's interactions with their extended family, friends and colleagues in more depth, including Lois' tyrannical mother Ida (Cloris Leachman); Lois' hapless coworker at the Lucky Aide drugstore Craig Feldspar (David Anthony Higgins); Malcolm's best friend Stevie Kenarban (Craig Lamar Traylor), who is both a wheelchair user and highly asthmatic; and Stevie's dad Abe (Gary Anthony Williams), as well as a series of continuing subplots detailing Francis' misadventures at the military academy, from which he subsequently disenrolls to work in an Alaskan logging camp, before finally landing a job on a dude ranch run by an eccentric German couple.
The series differed significantly from the standard TV sitcom presentation commonplace at the time. Malcolm routinely broke the fourth wall by both narrating in voice-over and talking directly to the viewer on camera. The distinctive look and sound of the series relied heavily on elaborate post-production, including fast-cut editing, sound effects, musical inserts, the extensive use of locations, and the unusual camera styles, compositions and effects (e.g. overhead, tracking, hand-held and crane shots, and the frequent use of a wide-angle lens for both close-ups and ensemble scenes) that would be generally impractical or impossible to achieve in a standard studio-based video multi-camera sitcom production. The show employed neither a laugh track (which was standard in other TV sitcoms) nor a live studio audience. Emulating the style of hour-long dramas, this half-hour show was shot on film instead of on video.[clarification needed]
Another distinctive aspect of the show is that the cold open of nearly every episode is unrelated to the main story. Exceptions include episodes which were the conclusions of "two-parters"; each part two episode opened with a recap of its part one episode.