Life’s Still Unfair’ Came to Be

[This story contains some spoilers for Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair.]

A couple minutes into Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, there’s an establishing shot of the outside of Hal and Lois’ house. It’s a familiar one from the original run of Malcolm — peeling paint, unkempt front yard, the usual eyesore.

Then, in a quick cut, an HGTV-worthy makeover: It’s nice now. For series creator Linwood Boomer, that shot represents Hal (Bryan Cranston) and Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) having made it through the travails of raising five sons, all of whom are out of the house now.

“I thought it was obvious — when you don’t have the kids around fucking destroying everything, you can actually have a nice house,” Boomer tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s not pointless to paint.”

Chaos will eventually reign, of course: Life’s Still Unfair, a four-episode revival of Malcolm in the Middle that premiered Friday on Hulu, wouldn’t be true to the original series if that weren’t the case. The story revolves around Lois planning a 40th anniversary party for her and Hal and bringing the entire family back to celebrate. Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), now the single father to a teenage daughter, Leah (Keeley Karsten), contrives a number of excuses to keep his distance he’s established for his entire adult life.

A lot of the plot revolves around Malcolm’s attempts to avoid his family; as he tells Leah, he’s a much better person when he’s not around them. But the show is also driven by Cranston’s Hal, who is both chafing at the fact that Lois has forbidden him from making a huge romantic gesture for their anniversary and having serious issues with his impending empty nester status (their nonbinary child, Kelly, played by Vaughan Murrae, still lives at home but is nearing adulthood).

As Boomer and his fellow executive producer and wife, Tracy Katsky Boomer, tell it, Cranston was a driving force behind the revival, so it seems natural that Hal would be central to much of what happens in the four episodes.

“Everyone on the show has kept in touch over the years. For a very long time, Bryan kept expressing an interest in doing a revival/reboot/reunion — while he was in the middle of Breaking Bad, I might add,” Boomer says. “I was like, you like that job! What the hell?

“I didn’t have any good ideas for it. We talked about it quite often, and then he was really pestering me about it four or five years ago. Tracy said, you know, why don’t you give your good friend the courtesy of at least listening and thinking about what he’s asking you? And I was like, Jesus, all right!”

“So in other words, we shamed him and jolted him into it,” Katsky Boomer says. “It was a group effort, led by Bryan.”

Boomer did eventually hit on an idea and initially wrote it as a feature film script. After some back and forth with Malcolm in the Middle producer 20th Television — and a long pause during the labor strikes of 2023 — they settled on four episodes. Ken Kwapis, who directed 19 episodes of the 2000-06 series, came on board to helm all four episodes of the revival, and they went about reassembling the core cast and finding actors to play Leah, Kelly, and Malcolm’s girlfriend Tristan (Kiana Madiera) and younger brother Dewey (Caleb Ellsworth-Clark). Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey in the original series, quit acting in 2010 and has pursued an academic career.

It took a while to sync up everyone’s schedules — including working around Muniz’s driving in NASCAR’s Truck Series — but there wasn’t much question about the original cast returning.

“We weren’t worried … because of Bryan,” Katsky Boomer says. “We would get [updates from him saying] ‘Hey. I just had dinner with Jane. She’s totally on board!’ ‘Hey, I was just in Phoenix and saw Frankie. Guess what? He’d love to!’ It was always very clear that everyone was ready.”

Once on set, the cast (both old and new) fell into their roles like very little time had passed, Kwapis tells THR. “I felt very passionate about my work in the original show. I felt like the show really offered me, as a director, an opportunity to go out on a limb and do some crazy things. I was just like a duck in water once I started working on the revival,” Kwapis says. “The other thing is that the main cast slipped back into their roles very quickly, and then the main cast embraced the new members of the ensemble, Vaughan, Keeley and Kiana. That’s one of the wonderful things, is that those three actors, they felt like they had been part of the ensemble forever.”

Among the crazy things Kwapis, Boomer and the Malcolm team did in the revival was Hal having a drug trip and speaking to multiple versions of himself as the centerpiece of the third episode. “We talked about all of that hallucination stuff with Bryan, and I wanted to make sure that I was getting his take,” Boomer says. “As much as Hal was my character, it’s way more Bryan’s character, and he’s done so much more research about who Hal is than I did even as the writer. I really leaned on him a lot for figuring out the issues and the conflicts that Hal would be dealing with at this age.”

The finale centers on the anniversary party, which featured a host of recurring characters from the show’s original run and a number of background actors — and also a massive glitter explosion, bringing Malcolm in the Middle’s signature brand of mayhem back to the forefront to close out the revival.

“All I will say, because I don’t want to give too much away, is that in order to make something look spectacularly chaotic, it requires a lot of pre-planning, as opposed to just, ‘Oh, gee, this is going to be chaotic.’” Kwapis says. “No — in order to create a sense of spectacular chaos, we had to lay out every beat of it in advance.”

Kwapis adds, “I would say that there are definitely — not just that sequence — more than a few moments in the revival where, thank God it worked on take one.”

Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair streams on Hulu, as does the original series.