TV Tragedy: Malcom in the Middle

When the gestalt entity Grant Naylor decided to bring their hit BBC series Red Dwarf to America, they found the transition to be a good deal less smooth than they had anticipated. Grant and Naylor were brought into a room with several writers for the American version - among them Linwood Boomer who would go on to create Malcom in the Middle - and the two quickly became known as "The Wave of Negativity."

Why, you ask? Because instead of doing what everybody else in the room was doing - just throwing out as many greasy one-liners as they could in hopes that something would stick - they desired to fix inherent problems with the story. Because, the two British gents knew well, no matter how many one-liners you covered a bad story with, it could not fix the problem.

This event, singular though it may be, is exemplary of what would be to come of Malcolm in the Middle. Though this show lasted an unfortunate seven seasons, it never once bothered to address its inherent issues. Why bother when you can have success by covering up your inherent issues with one-liners?

Well because this show may have been successful while it was running its first several seasons, but it has no lasting power. By the time the show came to an end, who really cared any more?

Because it may be easy enough to watch a handful of episodes and laugh at the silly jokes and the ridiculous situations, but watching a show like this must get incredibly tiresome. The characters are two-dimensional, one-word personalities. They exist for no purpose but to make a specific type of joke every time they appear. If something were to happen to these characters that might be considered "drama," who the hell is going to care? Who has any kind of emotional attachment to a character that literally exists just to make jokes? And perhaps the most amazing aspect of the 7 seasons that the show got was the fact that there was absolutely no character development whatsoever between the beginning and the end of the show.

There wasn't a single character in the show that wasn't entirely annoying by the end of an episode, yet somehow people still sat down week after week to watch this show.

Just goes to show you that people don't pay any attention when they watch shows on TV. They want to laugh at some stupid one liner without having to devote too much of their attention to what's going on.

Fuck you, T.V. And fuck you, Malcolm in the Middle.