Malcolm in the Middle S2E20: "Bowling"

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire


"Malcolm in the Middle" came out right at the start of the edgification of American daytime TV, in 2000. Things like it already existed. "Married With Children" (1987-1997) was probably MitM's main sitcom precedent. But, this is when the black comedy (former) fringe of cable entertainment was becoming the dominant tendency. For context, "Family Guy" was about to take over the cartoon sitcom niche by storm. Shock and transgression as humor reigned king over this platform for more or less the following decade.

Within the milieu it helped spearhead, "Malcolm in the Middle" isn't that extreme. A lot of one-upmanship in the following years pushed creators to go further and further into cynical black comedy. By the standards of its time though, it was definitely on the shocking end of the mainstream TV entertainment.

Its formula isn't anything unusual. Sitcom following a lower-middle class family, including a dorky father, a highstrung mother, and a litter of chronically misbehaving children (all boys, in this case). The central character is Malcolm, a middle child as the title implies, whose uncomfortable placement between his younger and older brothers contributes to him being a lightning rod within the already fairly dysfunctional family.

Apparently, "Malcolm in the Middle" as a whole actually has some really important things to say about class anxiety and generational abuse. I don't recall getting those things from the episodes I saw in my teens, but I was in my teens, so it easily could have gone over my head.


This particular episode, "Bowling," attracted attention and won awards for doing something much less formulaic than the series as a whole. Something that plays with the episodic structure in a way that you normally only get in high-concept scifi shows. When older brothers Reese and Malcolm ask their parents to take them to meet some schoolfriends at the bowling alley while younger brother Dewey is grounded for (somehow) killing the neighbour's parakeet. One parent will have to drive the older two to the alley while the other stays home with Dewey. And, in a moment of genre-bending multiversal perspective, we split into following two different timelines where each parent chooses a different role.

The split-screen only happens at the beginning, the ending, and at a few carefully juxtaposed moments in the middle. Most of the episode just cuts between timeline to recount the same approximate increments of time in each.

It's understandable that this gimmick would get the episode a lot of attention and praise, given the generally same-y structure that any given episode of any given sitcom most often follows. This being a low-stakes, low-consequences story within an episodic series also leaves the tantalizing question of which version is supposed to have actually happened.

That said: aside from that one creative twist, "Bowling" isn't great. It's been a very long time since I saw any Malcolm in the Middle (the last time I watched an episode of it was while it was airing. IE, when I was in middle school), but even at the time I don't remember finding it a particularly good show, and this episode isn't challenging my recollections.

Both timelines split themselves between the older brothers at the bowling alley where they compete for the attention of the same girl, and the younger brother at home trying to have as much fun as possible under the nose of his own overseeing parent. Most of the timeline-split based humor comes from the father's lackadaisical, inattentive approach to whichever son(s) he's chaperoning, and the mother's domineering mania. The father lets the Reese and Malcolm bowl away with their friends and then goes over to bowl with his own friends a few lanes over, unwisely trusting them to not get into trouble. The mother deliberately goes out of her way to do everything she can to intrude into their social event and (knowingly and spitefully) humiliate her sons. The father is easily tricked into putting himself asleep by Dewey, who subsequently steals his credit card and uses it to order pizza and watch R-rated movies. The mother spends the entire evening obsessing over what Dewey might be plotting to reduce his boredom and frustration and ultimately punishing herself more than him through the sheer stress.

It's kinda just the same 3-4 jokes over and over again, for the most part. And it wasn't a particularly good joke in the first place for most of them.

The positive standout is the father's own little subplot at the bowling alley, where he scores a perfect strike and then gets obsessed with replicating everything about his throw (down to the amount of noise pollution in the background, who he was saying "excuse me" to before lunging forward, and having his own fly unzipped) in order to get the same results, and somehow succeeds.

The escalating celebrity that he enjoys from the other grown-up bowlers at his side of the alley, and the way his streak of glory is tragically (and inevitably) ended in his last throw by his own sons' shenanigans after he made the mistake of leaving them unattended for half an hour, is well paced, well acted, and genuinely pretty funny.

Unfortunately, the subplot that takes up the most screentime and narrative focus is Malcolm and Reese competing over this girl. And I swear to god, this girl is one of the worst executed one-off characters I can remember seeing in any sitcom.

I don't know if the actress was really that bad, or if she just took a look at the script and decided to phone it in, because she's wooden in a way that comes across downright creepy. Like, when she leads Malcolm off out of sight in one of the timelines, I legitimately thought the twist was going to be that she'd try to harvest his kidneys or something. The character is written as if she KNOWS she's going to make out with one of these two brothers (but not with either of the other boys in attendance...) by the end of the night, and that her only question is which of them will convince her that it should be him. I couldn't tell you anything about her personality or interests outside of the avenues they bring her down, besides "she likes making out with awkward sitcom boys, but not in, like, an 'easy' way."

She's not written that way in a self-aware or self-parodying way either. It's just lazy, dehumanizing writing. Making her an actual person wouldn't have just been less uncomfortable, it also would have created room for so many more gags as we see the brothers trip over the same quirks of hers in a different way in each timeline.

This is kind of an issue with the female characters in general. The father gets to be the protagonist of his own little arc in the timeline that he isn't asleep for. In both timelines, the show invites you to empathize with him a bit, even if he's a dork. The mother is just this impersonal outside force that does unpleasant, embarrassing things at her children. The one exception to this being when she briefly agonizes over whether she's being too hard on Dewey while locking him down at home or not hard enough. For half a minute there, I saw a joke about a high-strung parent trying to deal with the stresses of handling a difficult child. But it was brief. In the timeline where she goes to the bowling alley, she's just this bizarre, motiveless caricature all the way through.

Probably par for the course for media of this era. But, eh whatever.

One other minor positive highlight is this one bit in the timeline where the father brings them bowling, and Reese gets frustrated at Malcolm being favored by the girl and tries to hit his toes with a bowling ball hurled sideways across the alley. Mostly just because of the amusing cinematography surrounding the ball's movement and everyone around its' reactions.

Not much else worth writing home about, either good or bad. Just sorta meh. A creative idea for an episode, saddled with mostly lazy writing and unfunny jokes. If this show really does have stronger social commentary stuff going on, then it isn't apparent in this particular episode.