Brainiacs and Maniacs

By James Poniewozik

There's nothing wrong with being cut from the herd," frazzled mother Lois tells her son Malcolm, who has just tested--to his chagrin--as a genius. "It makes you the one buffalo that isn't there when the Indians run the rest of them off the cliff." That, or it makes you the easiest target for sharpshooters; whoever coined the term "gifted" clearly never received a wedgie for being a brain. As the oddball sitcom Malcolm in the Middle (Fox, Sundays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.) shows, being pegged as special is more a "gift" in a Let's Make a Deal sense. Behind one door is advantage and opportunity; behind another, humiliation and alienation. (Look what it did for Anakin Skywalker.)

And being shipped off to gifted class is not unlike becoming a child star: you have your Ron Howards and Jodie Fosters, and then you have your E! True Hollywood Stories ("But the future would hold different strokes indeed for young Gary Coleman ..."). Nevertheless, actor Frankie Muniz, 14, is facing that enviable yet uncertain future eagerly. Like his character Malcolm, a spunky grade-schooler with a 165 IQ (he's Bart and Lisa Simpson), Muniz was plucked early, spotted by an agent at age 8 playing Tiny Tim onstage in A Christmas Carol. Several TV and stage roles later, the scrawny, blue-eyed Frankie, his mother Denise and his sister Cristina, 15, are moving from Woodridge, N.J., to Los Angeles and getting ready for life in the spotlight. This month, not only has Malcolm hit the airwaves in a flurry of hype--Fox is plugging it hard after a cataclysmic fall season--but Muniz's first movie, the 1940s coming-of-age story My Dog Skip, is opening.

Executive producer Linwood Boomer (3rd Rock from the Sun) loosely based the series on his own more prosaic experience of being labeled "gifted" and growing up in a California household of "four monstrously hungry kids who broke everything." His script charmed Fox entertainment president Doug Herzog, who committed to 13 episodes despite the show's cost (shot with a single camera for a more cinematic look, it costs about $1 million an episode, compared with at least $750,000 per half-hour sitcom). The producers launched a nationwide search for Boomer's megabrained alter ego and found Muniz on the second day. "We were distrustful because it happened so fast," Boomer says. "Frankie doesn't have those bad habits that most kid actors have. He has a great sense of timing and is also really honest."

The exaggerated version of the Boomers in Malcolm is a breakfast-food commercial gone psycho, a battle zone where there's always one less frozen waffle than child and where three brothers--a fourth's in military school--commit hilariously baroque mayhem on one another and the house: "Leave the squirrel alone and get the fire extinguisher!" we hear in one scene. Supporting Muniz is a crack cast, especially Jane Kaczmarek as Lois and Erik Per Sullivan as littlest brother Dewey, an amiable first-grader with the brain of a turnip.

The show has its trendy crutches: its main device, in which Muniz talks to the viewers (now there's something you don't see every night), is its biggest liability. But the show's bratty good nature more than makes up for it. Visually antic and full of belly laughs (a rarity this season), Malcolm is cartoonish in the best sense of the word, yet it doesn't deny any of its characters humanity, even (rarer still) the parents. It's now rote to knock TV and real-life families as morally bankrupt, and when shown to the press last year, the pilot was wrongly lumped with the fall's genuine network sleaze for its mild (and funny) scenes of parental nudity. But Malcolm is a testament to the virtues of an imperfect home; Malcolm's fratricidal sibs and daft folks keep him grounded as he adjusts to life as a reluctant prodigy.

That reluctance is where the parallel between Muniz and his character ends. Even as work cuts into his tee time--a golfer since age 5, Muniz has a 13 handicap--he relishes his 9 1/2-hr. shooting days. Still, he says, "I don't see myself as different from other kids." To ensure he stays that way, Denise has quit her job as a nurse to tend to her son, who's being home-schooled. "I want Frankie to stay a good kid," she says. "I love it when people say he's talented, but I love it more when people say he's a nice kid."

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles