This revival does the impossible: it’s effortlessly funny and refreshing, and Bryan Cranston’s performance is unmissable. They have to make more
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t this point, Bryan Cranston is firmly entrenched as one of the world’s finest actors. He has seven Emmys, two Tonys and a Golden Globe to his name. History, quite rightly, will remember him as one of the greats. That said – and this really wasn’t a sentence I expected to write a couple of hours ago – there is a distinct possibility that the greatest work of his entire career might be the scene in the Malcolm in the Middle revival where he thrashes around naked as he is overcome by a drug-induced ego death.
Perhaps this does make some small amount of sense. Although Malcolm in the Middle became best known as an absurd counterpoint to Breaking Bad – the sheer dramatic intensity of the latter playing against the generic sitcom daddery of the former – those of us who always loved the show knew that Cranston spent a lot of it going full throttle.
Malcolm in the Middle, after all, was the sitcom that kept cutting back to Cranston having his back shaved, or covered in bees, or screaming in horror because he thought his son’s skull had just exploded. If you threw that much at Cranston before he became an icon, then a gibbering chemical breakdown barely feels like a stretch.
