SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair”
You’re not the boss of me now, but Linwood Boomer is still the boss of “Malcolm in the Middle.” And with the series returning after a 20-year hiatus for the four-episode revival “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair,” some things were bound to be different, including how it looks.
“The house is a different house, and it’s supposed to be, because it’s the house that Hal and Lois would have if the kids hadn’t been ruining everything every day,” Boomer says in an interview with Variety. But it’s not just the set — the color of the whole series looks different. The original show had a warmer, grainier texture to it, whereas the new episodes are more crisp and clean. Part of that has to due with the fact that the new episodes were shot digitally, while the original was shot on 16mm film.
Executive producer Tracy Katsky Boomer also said shooting the show in Canada versus California made it look different as well. “Some of it was just shooting in Vancouver,” she says. “That light is a different color. Vancouver is more blue, and we shot the original one in Southern California, which is more amber. So we actually went through and re-color timed a lot of it because it felt too cold to us.”
But the dysfunctional family hijinks remains very much the same. In the show, Malcolm (Frankie Muniz) has distanced himself from his family to the point that they don’t know he has a teenage daughter, played by Keeley Karsten.
“Once Tracy gave me the idea of Malcolm having a daughter who is exactly like him, that really unlocked a lot of stuff,” Linwood Boomer says. “My kids are not exactly like me, but they are kind of inconveniently smart, in a way that really just completely negated my entire parental toolkit.”
The revival culminates in an episode built around Hal and Lois’ 40th anniversary party, where a massive range of actors from the original show make an appearance. One group that makes a particular impression is the Krelboynes, played by Kyle Sullivan, Victor Z. Isaac and Evan Matthew Cohen. The three engage in a dance routine so chaotically funny that the Boomers ended up working a similar routine featuring the whole cast and crew into the end of the episode.
“They did that dance, and the entire crew fell on the floor — and that’s how we ended up doing it,” Linwood Boomer says. “In the end credits, we just said, ‘You know, we should all do that Krelboyne dance.’ We just got everyone — the crew, the cast, all the actors. It was just really fun.”
And while the end of Episode 4 leaves room for more stories in Malcolm’s adult life, the Boomers say they have no plans to do more episodes at this time.
“This thing would never have happened if it was an open ended thing,” Linwood Boomer says. “Bryan’s got a very eminent career. Frankie’s got, like, seven eminent careers going. The the only way we were able to do this was by making it a closed-ended thing. Maybe it’s possible to do another closed sort of thing in the future, but there’s no discussions about that.”
“Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” is currently streaming on Hulu.
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