Malcolm In The Middle creator warns fans not to expect more revival episodes

"Bryan’s got a very eminent career. Frankie’s got, like, seven eminent careers going."

Malcolm In The Middle creator warns fans not to expect more revival episodes

It was already kind of a miracle that Hulu’s recent Malcolm In The Middle revival, Life’s Still Unfair, happened at all. (Let alone that it turned out to be a genuinely pretty fun update to the 2000s-era Fox favorite.) Star Frankie Muniz has been essentially retired from acting for years, having spent large portions of the last two decades driving race cars, while Bryan Cranston has become so insanely busy doing drama that it’s shocking to see how silly (and nude) he’s still willing to get for his favorite family of sitcom psychopaths. But if you enjoyed the series (which aired all four of its episodes in a block earlier this week), don’t hold out hopes you might be getting more: Series creator Linwood Boomer has wasted little time in shooting that idea down.

Boomer was talking to Variety about the reboot, which picks up with Muniz’s Malcolm living a pretty happy life, said happiness resting largely on the strength of him almost completely isolating himself from his still-unnamed family. (Except for his teenage daughter, played by Keely Karsten, whose Leah has inherited many of her dad’s hyper-perceptive, talking-directly-to-camera quirks.) When asked if there were any plans to continue the series—which ends in a way that could pretty easily be extended out—Boomer noted that part of getting everybody on board for the project was promising that it wouldn’t become a major, ongoing time commitment. “This thing would never have happened if it was an open-ended thing,” Boomer noted. “Bryan’s got a very eminent career. Frankie’s got, like, seven eminent careers going. The only way we were able to do this was by making it a closed-ended thing.”

Life’s Still Unfair managed to reunite almost the entirety of the old show’s cast, with only the retired-from-acting Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey on the show, declining to return. (He was replaced by Caleb Ellsworth-Clark.) Interestingly, and despite his packed schedule, Cranston was one of the loudest voices calling for a revival, banging the drum loudly for several years before formal plans were even in place. Boomer, meanwhile, does concede that this may not be the very last time we revisit Hal, Lois, and their various highly destructive kids: “Maybe it’s possible to do another closed sort of thing in the future, but there’s no discussions about that.”

 
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