I cried at Malcolm in the Middle on Saturday night. Properly cried, on the sofa, at gone half ten, snot and everything. Over a revived sitcom I used to be vaguely fond of but had no very strong feelings about. I am not proud of this. I am an almost-45 year-old culture writer with strong opinions about Andor.
I’d sat down to binge Life’s Still Unfair, the four-episode revival that landed on Disney+ last Thursday, and I’d expected roughly nothing. Nostalgia. Callbacks. Bryan Cranston in his pants. Something warm and safe and undemanding. For big stretches that’s what it is. And Cranston is magnificent in it, by the way. Genuinely magnificent. His time spent at the coalface of peak TV has sharpened both his pathos and his clowning instincts. There’s an episode in which he experiences ego death via miming his own birth, naked in an empty room. It’s astonishing. Everyone is on form, actually. Frankie Muniz has barely acted in two decades and he’s amazing in this. That’s not the only reason that the requel series works though. Something about it felt like coming home. Admittedly, to a house where someone’s always screaming and something’s always on fire, but if you grew up in a chaotic working-class family, that’s more comforting than it probably should be.
I’ve been having this feeling a lot. I’ve been watching the Scrubs revival, too, dropping weekly on Disney+ for the past month or so, and it does something similar. Braff and Faison and Chalke slot back into J.D. and Turk and Elliot like sixteen years happened nowhere except the artfully hidden turkey skin of their necks (I’ve got that too), and every week I feel something in my shoulders drop. Something unclench. Bill Lawrence wrote the first episode himself and he’s still got the knack for burying a devastating little moment inside a daft joke, and every time it lands I think: yes! This! More of this, please. Whatever this is.
I know what it is. It’s not very sophisticated. I want telly that makes me feel safe. And I’m a bit embarrassed by that, because I’ve spent years championing the other kind of television. I’ve written on this very website about Andor, about Daredevil: Born Again, about the golden age of prestige genre TV. I believe in all of that. I think ambitious, demanding television is important. And yet here I am, actively choosing J.D.’s whimsical inner monologue over something challenging, because by nine o’clock I am too tired to be challenged.
Both shows are completely, unmistakably themselves. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. They haven’t been modernised or reimagined or given a gritty prestige makeover, like they did with Fresh Prince. Malcolm still breaks the fourth wall. Scrubs still does the fantasy cutaways. These are the same formats that felt tired and played-out by the time the originals wound down, by which point I’d long stopped watching either show, and now those exact formats are the reason they feel special. Not because the storytelling is simple, especially. It’s not, and never really has been. But because the shape is familiar. The comedic rhythms. The emotional grammar. The knowledge that whatever happens in the next twenty-five minutes, you are fundamentally going to be OK.
Malcolm in the Middle ran from 2000 to 2006. Scrubs from 2001 to 2010. TFI Friday, which Channel 4 announced today is also coming back (this Friday, 11pm, because apparently we’re just doing all of this now), ran from 1996 to 2000. If you’re a millennial, these shows map onto the specific years when you were becoming a person. The youngest millennials were thirteen, fourteen when Malcolm ended, just starting to figure out who they were and what they liked. The oldest were in their mid-twenties, having adventures, falling in love for real, earning those brutal hangovers and glorious next-days on the sofa, somehow managing to live on basically nothing and learning through trial and error what it meant to be a grown-up. These shows, and many like them, (The OC, My Name Is Earl, Buffy, Friends, Gilmore Girls, the whole glorious range of the early DVD boxset era) the background radiation of the period when everything felt possible and nothing had gone permanently, irreversibly wrong yet.
Before the financial crash. Before austerity. Before Brexit. Before Bowie died. Before the news became something that happened to you, every single day, relentlessly, whether you wanted it or not. Because Millennials are exhausted. We are bone-deep, structurally knackered, in a way that we’ve been for so long now that we’ve forgotten what not being exhausted feels like. We’re the generation that was told we’d do better than our parents and then watched every ladder get pulled up behind us, one by one. And when we greet like an old friend the moment when Malcolm melts down and keys his brother’s car, or J.D. looks wistfully to the top left, cupping his chin in anticipation of another whimsical cutaway, both silly and completely sincere, I don’t think we’re just being nostalgic. I think we’re reaching back for the last version of ourselves that believed things were going to be alright. It’s the same reason everyone went to see Oasis last year. I don’t know if that’s healthy. I suspect it isn’t, entirely.
There’s a tipping point, obviously. These revivals work because the originals were properly, genuinely good, and the people making the new versions understand why. Malcolm In The Middle creator Linwood Boomer and his wife, executive producer Tracy Katsky, haven’t just warmed up the leftovers. They’ve found new things to say. Nobody needs a legacy sequel to Two and a Half Men. Not everything needs the requel treatment… though, by the gods, we deserved the Buffy one. Still, there’s a line between seeking comfort and just mainlining the past because you can’t face the present, and I’m not always confident I know which side of it I’m on.
But then there’s the scene that made me cry. In the final episode of Life’s Still Unfair, the youngest Wilkerson sibling Kelly (Vaughan Murrae), who is non-binary, talks about coming out to Hal. About asking their dad if something was wrong with them, and seeing in his eyes that he already knew. That he’d always known. That it was fine. Cranston isn’t even in the scene. Kelly is describing a moment, not performing it, and we don’t need to see it because we know Hal. We’ve watched him love his family for seven seasons, loudly and chaotically and without conditions, and we know what Bryan Cranston’s face would be doing. He’s so good, he makes you cry in a scene he isn’t even in. Boomer and Katsky wrote it from their own lives (three of their four kids are queer), and it gives it an earned sincerity that makes the moment properly sing. It’s not a statement. It’s just a fact about a person, delivered inside a sitcom that has always understood that families are messy and love doesn’t come with terms and conditions.
And it wrecked me. Not because I sat down expecting to be wrecked, but because the show had already gotten past my walls. I’d spent three and a half episodes sinking back into the familiar rhythms of a thing I thought I’d outgrown, letting it do its work, feeling safe. And then, with my guard completely down, it found something I didn’t know was still there. I was a bisexual kid who grew up working class under Section 28, who didn’t properly understand his own sexuality until he was well into his 30s. I thought I’d processed all of that. Turns out Malcolm in the Middle had other ideas.
That’s what the best of these revivals can do. Not just comfort, but something stranger and more useful: they get you to a place where you’re soft enough to feel something you’ve been holding at arm’s length. They earn it by being exactly what you remember, and then they spend that trust on something new. I don’t know whether the current wave of millennial nostalgia is a sign of cultural health or cultural surrender. I suspect it’s a bit of both. I suspect we’re all more tired than we’d like to admit, and I suspect that’s why eleven million people watched the Scrubs premiere in five days and Malcolm has been all over social media since Friday.
I don’t have a tidy answer. I just know that on a Saturday night, wrung out by the week and the news and the relentless weight of being a grown-up in whatever this is we’re living through, a 26-year-old sitcom found something in me I’d sealed shut and opened it up, and I’m grateful, and I’m a bit shaken, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with that.
Has millennial nostalgia gone too far? Yes..? No…? Maybe? I don’t know. Can you repeat the question…
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