Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair! celebrates the past while keeping up with the times

When Malcolm in the Middle (in our parts, simply Malcolm, for everyone) arrived in Italy in the early 2000s, I was already a bit outside the target audience for the series, for several reasons. Besides my age, alas, already older than practically the entire band of brothers, there was always that problem of being an only child that didn't lend itself well to identifying with the middle child of a large family. This preamble is to say that for me, Malcolm was not the series of a lifetime; in fact, I don't think I ever watched it in its entirety or with the right sense of consequentiality of events: an episode here, twenty minutes while I munched on something, a few scenes seen on YouTube at a friend's suggestion… in short, the classic relationship with Mediaset's afternoon series, which somehow end up inserting random episodes into the lives of all those not yet of working age, willingly or unwillingly.

Yet, in that hypnotic succession of images that was the post-Simpsons afternoon slot for at least a couple of generations, Malcolm managed to stand out to the point of becoming recognizable even in the frenzy of channel surfing, to the point of possessing a personality such that it could be identified in a couple of frames. The series created by Linwood Boomer managed to frame the edgy spirit of the time in a hyper-classic formula, that of the family sitcom, delivering a nastier and more cynical version, more '2000s in short, than many other dysfunctional families on the small screen that had preceded it, but still in a format suitable for the afternoon after school (for the more raw and crude version we would have to wait for Shameless).

All this premise to say that the idea of Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair! (by the way, how much better is the original title Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair?), a new (mini) revival/tribute series, hadn't particularly warmed my heart, also because the one produced by Hulu (and arriving here on Disney+) is certainly not the first similar operation. Despite this, the result seemed much more successful than many other similar cases.

• The plot of Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair!
• Thoughts on Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair!

The plot of Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair!

The premise of this new four-episode series sees good old Malcolm finally fulfilled and happy. And all this success at the sole price of never or almost never seeing his family. The realization was simple: “Away from them, I am a better person.” All those oddities, near-fatal accidents, and absurd arguments protracted for weeks with pranks and retaliations only happen when Malcolm is among his parents and brothers. Outside of that bubble, Malcolm is a brilliant and accomplished man: he has a daughter, a partner, and a prestigious job at a volunteer association. The latter, moreover, is a perfect job position to justify any absence or unanswered phone call with unavoidable and tiring work commitments. However, the elegant and intricate system of strategic calls and emails programmed to depart at night jams when Malcolm is invited to his parents' 40th wedding anniversary.

According to Boomer himself in interviews, the inspiration for the 4-episode reunion came from his wife's idea: what if Malcolm had a daughter who was just like him? Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair!, however, goes beyond this concept to investigate a much more interesting one: how do you survive a dysfunctional family? Or perhaps simply how do you survive your own family, given that I haven't yet encountered any non-dysfunctional ones. Obviously, for the sake of comedy, everything here is taken to the extreme, starting with Malcolm's attitude, yet in that refusal to adhere to tradition and family wishes, there is an experience shared by generations and generations, amplified in this new millennium by the speed with which the world evolves, distancing the experiences of children and parents.

Thoughts on Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair!

Paradoxically, these four episodes finally made me empathize with the protagonist: hey, buddy, what it means to be the middle brother I still ignore, but what it means to try to make your parents understand that at forty you are no longer their child, no one needs to explain to me. Without sacrificing sharp humor and that right dose of nastiness, but with a clear idea of what the spirit of the times is (see how the fifth, non-binary brother is handled: far from “you can't say anything anymore,” the fundamental problem is that you need to have something funny – and perhaps also intelligent – to say, and you need to know how to say it), Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair! grounds its caustic humor in the disillusionments of thirty and forty-somethings, amidst failed marriages, marital bedrooms in parents' garages, and healthy distances, photographing the carefree disillusionment with which generations straddling the millennium face a world that categorically refuses to be what it should have been in our parents' theories.

It is a ruthless yet indulgent vision, in which the collapse of secular social institutions (among which, above all, the family, of course) is contrasted by a rampant individualism that is not just selfishness, but also a form of resistance, of awareness that to be useful to someone you must first keep together the pieces of yourself that are still intact. I am probably not the best person to catch all the cameos and references to the old seasons (but there are many: in fact, I would almost venture to say all the ones you might expect), yet I still found my eyes a little moist at the end which, obviously, leans a bit on sentimentality, but at the same time exposes and photographs a generation that, instead of hiding traumas (familial and otherwise), or worse still reiterating them, has decided to come to terms with them and carry their marks.

There probably wasn't a need for this new season of Malcolm, just as there wasn't a need for a lot of other resurrected series to monetize nostalgia. But if operations of this type must be carried out, Malcolm: Life's Still Unfair! is an example from which notes should be taken.