Detractors of David E. Kelley's point out that he's peppered prime-time with too-thin women (Calista Flockhart on "Ally McBeal" and Lara Flynn Boyle on "The Practice") and awful, now-cancelled shows ("Ally" and "Snoops"). But TV's golden boy has actually helped television a lot more than he's hurt it, pushing it in new directions while reviving a certain brand of comedic television that's impossible but revealing, stupid but witty.
"Ally McBeal"'s influence was first evident in the WB's "Popular," a terrific, biting look at high school life and popularity featuring heavy doses of CGI graphics and Kelley-esque freakishness. Now it has given way to a younger version: Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle." The show is a perfect blend of intelligent commentary and uncontested absurdity; a "Wonder Years"-like look at family and schoolyard life as if by the Farrelly brothers.
The best thing about "Malcolm in the Middle" is, naturally, its title character. In Frankie Muniz, we have maybe the first kid actor in a decade to actually sound and look his age. Usually, you get a 20-year-old playing a 10-year-old or, even worse, a 10-year-old who's unable to act without reading from cue cards in a painfully obvious way (think Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen). When Malcolm gets called to the office during the pilot episode, the counselor asks, "Are you Malcolm?" He replies, "Yes, and I didn't do anything," with the perfect inflection of a pre-teen who's both exasperated and nervous. While the Internet Movie Database reports Muniz's age as 15, his Malcolm (who's age, and even last name, go unmentioned in the show) doesn't seem a moment past 12, if even 10.
Even better, the character isn't overwritten, a la "Dawson's Creek". The over-the-top stuff comes in everything that surrounds Malcolm, not from within him. Like in "Ally McBeal," there's a good mix of the completely bizarre and the somewhat believable. At one point, Malcolm's mom tells him, "You're going to be friends with that crippled boy and you're going to like it," and it's impossible to imagine anyone actually talking like that. But later, frazzled by her screaming, fighting boys and the laundry she's trying to finish, she answers the door topless. It's perfectly natural in that context.
But the show usually doesn't take the logical route. When Malcolm eats lunch after being declared a genius, he says, "Around here, being smart is exactly like being radioactive," and then points up. We're given an overhead view, which shows that the kids on the playground where Malcolm is eating are scattered about, except they are staying away from Malcolm in a perfect circle. When he moves, they move in the same direction, keeping the same radius of space between them and him.
Plus, to remind us this is an overwrought fantasy, we have Malcolm occasionally stepping out of scenes to tell us what he's thinking or what's going on. It's an overused and abused device, but here, it works well. We're in Malcolm's world now, a dreamland that manages to gain instant sympathy for the victim of a school bully and the kid whose mom is overbearing in the well-meaning sort of way.
"Malcolm in the Middle" gives Fox its first real shot in recent memory at a half-hour sitcom success ("The Simpsons" and "Futurama" are in a separate category of their own). And it gives us the chance to get a close-up look inside the life of another cross-section of our society — with a lot of stupidity thrown in to make sure we don't realize we're learning something.
