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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 and the disappearance of flight MH370 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.
In fact, reading the news in 2024 that the acclaimed US sitcom from the 2000s was being revived 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, I 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, 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, 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, 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 (a joyless remake of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) on Now TV, the return of Frasier 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 famously dubbed “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 (which originally aired the show) . Approved by Donald Trump in 2019, the deal created 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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