No generation is safe from the nostalgia industry – just look at the disappointing Malcolm in the Middle reboot | Johan Koshy

HeyOne day in the near future, millennials like me will move into nursing homes. Once we’re in, what will we do to pass the time? Narrative podcasts from the 2000s will likely be beamed into our bedrooms as the evening approaches, with early albums by Arctic Monkeys and Strokes available on demand. Paperbacks about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the disappearance of flight MH370 will line the bookshelves. In the TV room, the struggle for the remote would be over whether to rewatch The Simpsons, The Office, or Girls; But a small minority of us, especially those born in the early 1990s, will push for Malcolm in the East.

In fact, reading the news in 2024 that the popular American sitcom from the 2000s would be revived in a four-part miniseries on Disney+ was the first time I felt directly targeted by the nostalgia industry. (I guess that’s what it’s like to pay hundreds of pounds to see Paul Simon in 2026.) I was instantly transported back to the Sunday evenings of my childhood suburbia – the sad progress of school the next day paused on Sky One (channel 106), where I found a new episode about this melodramatic family combustion.

The show’s central conceit is that Malcolm – one of the four evil brothers – is a boy genius. His school noticed his intellectual talents in the first episode and placed him in the gifted class, where they keep “all kinds of goodies that they don’t waste on normal kids.” Malcolm in the Middle is usually remembered for the boys’ absurd pranks and Bryan Cranston’s role as Hal, the obsessive father. But for all its youthful hilarity, it worked because it was a comedy of social realism: As I argued on the show years ago, it was the family’s financial struggles that enlivened the drama, often captured in the image of the parents poring over bills at the kitchen table in their cluttered home. The characters rebel against work, school, and petty tyranny. There are stories about workplace consolidation and health insurance costs. In the show’s finale, released in 2006, Malcolm attends Harvard University, but can only afford the tuition by working as a janitor at the university.

Perhaps it was naive of me to expect this subversive worldview to be preserved and smuggled into the reboot. Malcolm in the Middle: Life Is Still Unfair, released in one go last week, is far from horror but less spiky and wild than the original. Malcolm now runs a successful charity and has largely isolated his family. They don’t even know he has a teenage daughter – he doesn’t want their chaotic and controversial ways to influence her. Hal and Lois’ discovery that they have a grandson prompts a story that culminates on their 40th wedding anniversary, where friends and family reunite and things go spectacularly wrong.

Twenty years later, most of the cast has been reassembled, and there is the usual voyeuristic pleasure in seeing how people age. But the show itself doesn’t have much to say. Socio-economic pressures, arguably more acute now than in the 2000s, are noticeably absent: everyone seems to have enough money and live in clean, comfortable homes. Aside from passing references to hatred of cops and the financial pressures of paying for a reunion, the “real world” hardly exists.

Malcolm in the Middle wasn’t the only ’90s and 2000s TV hit to get a reboot or remake recently. There’s Scrubs, the outrageous hospital comedy (a textbook “millennial cringe,” as one reviewer put it), which was revived for a full season on Disney+ after 17 years; The widely panned Bel Air (an unflattering remake of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) on Now TV, the return of Frasier on Paramount+ (which was, of course, a spin-off of Cheers) and much more besides. Many of these shows reference the present with a few easy observations (the young characters are quick to identify as awake or anxious; the older ones struggle with sweeping language) while maintaining their focus on reigniting their warm, familiar glow for aging viewers. “Comfortable viewing” in difficult times.

There is nothing original in noting that we live in an age addicted to digging into the past: my generation’s adolescence coincided with the height of what the cultural critic Simon Reynolds in 2011 called “retromania.” But there seems to be something particularly cruel and cruel about the culture industry’s underdeveloped output at the moment. Maybe the solution lies in the money: Rebooting Malcolm on Disney+ was only possible through the 2019 merger of Disney and Fox (which originally aired the show). The deal, approved by Donald Trump in 2019, has created another massive near-monopoly that seizes culture, identifies key demographics and streams content to them until they blink.

A lot has changed since 2006. Corporate power has strengthened; Wealth inequality has increased; Hopeful political movements emerged and faded; Millennials are turning gray and saying 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 seen through the eyes of our childhood. This is what motivates streamers to keep us looking back, when we all know, deep down, that we must face the future.