Malcolm in the Middle could soon receive the reboot treatment.
Star Frankie Muniz, 36, teased the revival during a recent interview with Fox, claiming his former co-star Bryan Cranston is leading the reunion effort.
“I know Bryan Cranston is really into the idea and he’s kind of heading writing the script and getting everything rolling,” Muniz said. “So, there might be something. I would be down, 100 percent. But I don’t know—we’ll see what happens.”
The hit sitcom that aired from 2000-06 on Fox. Muniz starred as the title character, alongside Cranston as his father Hal, Jane Kaczmarek as mother Lois, and Christopher Kennedy Masterson, Justin Berfield, and Erik Per Sullivan, who played Malcolm’s brothers Francis, Reese, and Dewey. The comedy ran for seven seasons and received a slew of honors and accolades, including seven Emmy Awards, a Grammy, and a Peabody.
”When I was filming the show, I obviously was a kid,” Muniz said. “We did seven seasons, 151 episodes. I didn’t really watch the show when it was on, but I’ve now since watched the show with my wife. We [watched] all 151 episodes…I realized, ‘Wow, that’s what we were making.’… I can separate myself from being on it and watching it as a fan. I would love to know what the family’s up to.”
Cranston has expressed interest in bringing the show back to the small screen. In a 2015 interview he said he’d prefer to reprise his role as patriarch Hal rather than his Breaking Bad character Walter White—who may or may not be the same person, per a hilarious fan theory the actor once acknowledged. “It’d be fun to pick up [Hal’s] clothes again and be fun and sweet and adorable and hapless and clueless and afraid of everything,” Cranston said. “I don’t have a yearning to go back into [Breaking Bad’s] world because we just covered it completely.”
Ironically enough he’s brought Walter White back twice since then, for cameos in the movie El Camino and the final season of Better Call Saul this year. Playing completely against type for Vince Gilligan’s eventual juggernaut beginning in 2008, Cranston raked in three consecutive Best Actor Emmys and a Golden Globe.
In 2020, he told E! News a Malcolm reboot was under discussion. “There’s a possibility,” he said. “We want to start talking about the possibility of putting together a story that makes sense about that family 10 years later, or whatever—12 years later. And it’s not unheard of…I don’t know how anything works anymore. But all I want to do is tell the story and have a good experience. It was a great time in my life.”
