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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NO GENERATION IS SAFE FROM THE NOSTALGIA INDUSTRY – JUST LOOK AT
THE DISAPPOINTING MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE REBOOT  
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Yohann Koshy
April 18, 2026
The Guardian
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_ The revival of the hit 2000s sitcom has none of the political
subversiveness of the original. But should we be surprised? Social and
economic pressures, arguably more intense now than in the 2000s, are
noticeably absent in the show. _

Justin Berfield, Emy Coligado, Frankie Muniz and Christopher
Masterson in Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair. ,
Photograph: David Bukach/Disney

 

One day in the near future, millennials like myself will be shuffling
off into care homes. Once inside, what will we do to pass the time?
Narrative podcasts from the 2010s will probably be piped into our
bedrooms as the evenings approach, with early albums by Arctic Monkeys
and the Strokes available on request. Paperback thrillers about the
2004 Boxing Day tsunami
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of flight MH370
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will line the bookshelves. In the TV room, the fight for the remote
will be over whether to rewatch The Simpsons, The Office or Girls; but
a small minority of us, particularly those born in the early 1990s,
will lobby for Malcolm in the Middle
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In fact, reading the news in 2024 that the acclaimed US sitcom from
the 2000s was being revived
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for a four-part miniseries on Disney+ was the first time I felt
directly targeted by the nostalgia industry. (This must be what it
feels like to pay hundreds of pounds to see Paul Simon in 2026
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thought.) At once I was transported back to the suburban Sunday
evenings of my childhood – the melancholic advance of school the
next day momentarily abated by Sky One (channel 106), where I’d find
a new episode about this combustive, melodramatic family.

The show’s central conceit is that Malcolm – one of four
devilishly mischievous brothers – is a boy genius; his intellectual
talents are noticed by his school in the first episode and they place
him in the gifted class, where they keep “all sorts of good things
they don’t waste on the normal kids”. Malcolm in the Middle is
usually remembered for the boys’ absurdist pranks and Bryan
Cranston’s Chaplinesque turn as Hal, the manic father. But for all
its juvenile zaniness, it worked because it was a comedy of social
realism: as I argued of the show years ago
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it was the family’s financial struggles that animated the drama,
often captured in the image of the parents poring over bills at the
kitchen table in their messy house. The characters rebel against work,
school and petty authoritarianism; there are storylines about
unionising the workplace and the costs of health insurance. In the
show’s finale, which went out in 2006, Malcolm gets into Harvard,
but he can only afford the tuition fees by working as a university
janitor.

Perhaps it was naive of me to expect this subversive worldview would
be preserved and smuggled into the reboot. Malcolm in the Middle:
Life’s Still Unfair
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which came out in one go last week, is far from terrible but it is
much less spiky and unruly than the original. Malcolm now runs a
successful charity and has largely cut off his family. They don’t
even know that he has a teenage daughter – he doesn’t want their
anarchic, disputatious ways rubbing off on her. Hal and Lois’s
discovery that they have a grandchild propels a storyline that
culminates at their 40-year wedding anniversary, where friends and
family reunite and things go impressively wrong.

Twenty years on, most of the cast has been reassembled and there is
the usual voyeuristic pleasure in seeing how people have aged. But the
show itself has little to say. Social and economic pressures, arguably
more intense now than in the 2000s, are noticeably absent: everyone
seems to have enough money and to live in clean, comfortable homes.
Aside from passing references to hating the cops and the budgetary
pressures of paying for the reunion party, the “real world” is
hardly present.

Malcolm in the Middle is not the only 1990s-2000s TV staple to have
gotten the reboot or remake treatment recently. There’s Scrubs
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the mawkish hospital comedy (textbook “millennial cringe”, as one
reviewer put it), which has been revived for a full season on Disney+
after 17 years; the widely panned Bel Air
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(a joyless remake of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) on Now TV, the
return of Frasier
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on Paramount+ (which was, of course, itself a spin-off from Cheers)
and plenty more besides. Many of these shows nod to the present with a
few easy observations (young characters are quickly established to be
woke or anxious; the older ones struggle with inclusive language)
while keeping their focus on rekindling their warm, familiar glow for
an ageing viewership. “Comfort viewing” for uneasy times.

There’s nothing original about observing that we live in an era that
is addicted to mining the past: my generation’s adolescence, after
all, coincided with the height of what the cultural critic Simon
Reynolds [[link removed]]
famously dubbed
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“retromania” back in 2011. But it does seem like there is
something particularly ruthless and unsparing about the culture
industry’s backwards-looking output at the moment. Perhaps the clue
is in the money: the Malcolm reboot on Disney+ was only made possible
by the 2019 merger of Disney and Fox
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(which originally aired the show) . Approved by Donald Trump in 2019,
the deal created
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another great, hulking quasi-monopoly that squats over the culture,
identifying key demographics and streaming content at them until their
eyes glaze over.

Much has changed since 2006. Corporate power has consolidated; wealth
inequality has intensified; hopeful political movements have risen up
and fizzled out; millennials have started greying and saying the
things about gen Z that were once said about them (except this time,
we’re right). What hasn’t changed is the appeal of returning to
the world as it was seen through our childhood eyes. This is what
incentivises the streamers to keep us looking back, when we all know,
deep down, we should be facing the future.

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Yohann Koshy is an Opinion deputy editor

* malcolm in the middle
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* social criticism
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* nostalgia
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* Working class identity
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