Spotlight on Malcolm In the Middle: Viewers Will Just Never Look at This Television Show the Same Way Again
Sometimes he is seen on the phone talking with his mom who, I guess, just couldn’t put up with his shenanigans at home. Francis uses the excuse, “Do you want what happened to me to happen to you?” every time his brothers get out of line. When each of them says, “No.” Francis then says, “Alright then. You better behave.” The second and next child is Reese, played by Justin Berfield. Reese, a wisecracking, think-he-knows-it-all kid, most of the time, doesn’t quite know what he wants. Then there’s Malcolm, played by Frankie Muniz. Malcolm, the narrator of the show, speaks to all the television viewers throughout each episode.
He is sort of like a perfectionist who wants to be liked by everybody and wants to appear like a normal kid in school. The youngest child is Dewey, played by Erik Per Sullivan. Dewey is a cute, hyperactive, and curious kid who questions everything. Lois, the mother, a very strict woman, is played by Jane Kaczmarek. When her kids talk back to her, she talks back to her kids. She loves her husband, Hal, more than anything and will do anything with him. Hal, a nice, laid-back father, is played by Bryan Cranston.
Being a little too nice, I think, is part of Hal’s problem. When something is not quite right, Hal will jump in to see what he can do. Most of the time, Hal just makes a particular problem an even bigger one.
This episode starts off when Hal shows a catmando, a cat jungle gym and a horrible looking playpen for a pet, to his wife. Lois just tells her husband to just get rid of it. It is Hal who doesn’t want to get rid of the catmando because it was a sign to his family that he really wanted a cat, but Lois, being the way she is, rightfully told him that he just can’t have it (firstly, because it’s too big, taking up a lot of space, and secondly, because it’s really ugly).
To please his wife, Hal took the catmando outside to be picked up by the garbage men and even left them a six pack of beer outside on this real ugly thingamajig as a bonus. When the garbage men see the six pack of beer, they will take it – like an advance in their pay – and they will hopefully take the catmando. What ends up happening is the garbage men taking just the six pack of beer, but not the catmando. The next day, one garbage man explains that he sees everything Hal and his family throw out, but it’s not to his liking.
After Hal tries to talk peacefully to the garbage man about taking the catmando, Reese comes outside from inside the house, throws the garbage man a garbage bag and says, “Hey! Did you forget something?!” The garbage man, at that moment, infuriated, gets in his garbage truck and drives off. Even though Hal is angry, he tries to remedy the situation. In the next scene, when no one is looking, he gets out of his car, walks over to the garbage man’s lawn with a garbage can, dumps it all over the lawn, and then quickly walks back to his car.
Not surprisingly, the next day, Hal finds that his front yard had been converted into a garbage dump site. Lois is speechless and doesn’t quite know what to say. Dewey, when he first sees all the garbage in the front yard, gets out his coat and sled. The ingenious little kid pretends that it’s the middle of winter (e. g. makes snow angels in the garbage, sleds down the pile of garbage, throws a garbage ball – a snowball to his older brother, Reese, and makes a garbage man – a snow man).
These scenes, like in every episode, are two totally different plots. Hal’s issue with his front yard becoming a garbage dump site is one of these plots and the other revolves around Lois on probation for bad behavior at her place of employment, a family-owned supermarket. Malcolm, oddly enough, also works there. Twice Lois, who works as a cashier, makes a mistake on the cash register, and both times she calls Malcolm who comes over with a key to fix the cash register problem.
The second time that Malcolm comes over, he notices an unflattering picture of himself and he asks Lois if she could just remove it. An earlier problem occurring in one of the aisles depicted an advertisement of a Black man holding a mop in his hands. Lois thought that this particular ad was offensive, not to mention racist-looking. Whenever Malcolm brought it over to the center of the store, Lois just had to get rid of it, but Malcolm kept on putting it back. Malcolm simply said to his mother that it is just depicting a man with a mop in his hands, seeing nothing offensive or racist about that. A customer applauded Lois for taking it down, but what made Lois angry is when Malcolm insisted on putting it back.
They argue back and forth to each other as they normally do in other episodes on the series. When Hal is playing cards with a bunch of Black men, Lois brings the ad depicting the Black man holding a mom in his hands into the house, clearly right in front of all the card players. Malcolm is there and says to his mom, “Why are you embarrassing me in front of Dad’s friends?” Lois wanted to prove a point. She asked the Black men, “Don’t you think this is offensive and racist?”. At that moment, another Black man appeared behind Lois with a mop in his hands. The Black men all just started laughing because this inexplicably mirrored the image of the ad.
In series television, just like in this one particular episode of “Malcolm In The Middle”, and as Mr. Donald Bogle notes in “Gender, Race, & Class In Media” on page 634: “. . . the African American characters were too often confined to the sidelines.” I have noticed the protagonists in “Malcolm In The Middle” are all white middle-class people. The African American characters on this particular show all have very minor parts. The Black men are all Hal’s friends and they are all seen in only one scene. They are depicted as all friendly, sociable, and funny people.
They laugh at something Lois finds really offensive and racist. The next day a fellow employee mentioned to Lois how the market has seen more and more Black customers come into the store just because of the particular ad. Lois soon realized just how effective that ad was in luring African American customers into the store. She, then, put this particular advertisement just where she had always seen her son placing it a few times before in the middle of the store. Malcolm couldn’t believe it. All he could think about doing, at that moment, was getting rid of the ad, but he couldn’t make up his mind. Malcolm finally decided that he was going to flip a coin. The coin, however, would not go down on either the heads side or the tails side, and Malcolm was totally beside himself.
As Ms. Karen Lindsey notes in “Gender, Race, & Class In Media” on page 626: “Most of the ensemble shows have black characters and female professionals, even if the real authority, like that of the real world, is uncritically in the hands of men.” “Malcolm In The Middle”, like other prime time network shows, is a male-dominated show. The real professional woman, depicted on this particular show, is Lois who is surrounded by male characters in every episode. She lives in a male-dominated world and she has to think on her feet at all times. Lois stays on top of everything. For example, she cooks meals for the boys, argues with Malcolm, teams up with her husband to face the cruel neighbors, reprimands Francis on the phone, and tries her best at work.
One of her problems in this particular episode was to rectify her situation at work. Did she ace her probation or not? A fellow employee told her that she had one hour left. We don’t really know if she was able to go the distance and be good enough to withstand the agony of her probation for just one hour. This is, especially on this series, one of the problems of episodic television. We are, most of the time, left wondering what will happen to one or two main characters on each of the episodes.
In another scene, which I found to be extremely humorous, Hal goes to Reese for help.
Together, that evening, they borrow a garbage truck and Hal convinces himself that he’s not stealing it. When they get to their house, Hal gets out of the truck and tells Reese what to do. Reese, clearly having no idea about any of the controls in the truck, presses a button and the truck takes out a fire hydrant. Reese and Hal, then, just run away from the house. Dewey questions why they’re running away because running away evidently is not going to solve the mess that they just got themselves into.
The episode ends when we see Hal serving a romantic dinner to a garbage man on his front lawn. Hal says to the garbage man, “Will it be two bags of garbage or one?” Hal will understandably agree to anything that this particular garbage man says he will do. He is now just desperate to get all the garbage off his lawn one way or another.
Humor is an integral part of the television show, “Malcolm In the Middle”. People of all ages, who can laugh at themselves and forget their real life troubles, are very much attracted to this wit. Series television, like this show, pleases both the young, the old, and, especially those “in the middle.”
