Malcolm in the Middle

After his favorite and oldest brother, 16-year old Francis (Christopher Masterson), is sent to military school, 12-year old Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), a boy with a dysfunctional family, living with a neurotic father, Hal (Bryan Cranston), control-freak mother Lois (Jane Kaczmarek), a slob and stupid bully 13-year old brother Reese (Justin Berfield), and 6-year old Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan), is given an I.Q. test by his teacher and is revealed to have an I.Q. of 165. He is transferred to the school’s gifted class against his wishes, and must cope with his desire to be normal despite having been recognized as a genius, trying to accept being a "Krelboyne", the school nerds who are rejected by other kids.

Lois is supposed to meet Hal at an expensive restaurant for their anniversary date, but Lois forgets to go after she finds her red dress burned and flushed down the toilet, sending her into a violent rage. She spends the night punishing Reese, Dewey, and Malcolm, trying to figure out which of them burned her dress. Meanwhile, Hal makes friends with a member of the restaurant staff while waiting for Lois. Malcolm, seeing that he and his brothers cannot fight Lois alone, calls Francis for help against Lois. It is later revealed that Hal burned the dress on accident.

While Hal and Lois are away for the weekend, Francis comes home from military school to babysit Malcolm, Reese, and Dewey. Malcolm overhears Lois and Hal’s discussion about Francis and believes he will be allowed to return home permanently if he does a good job, so he convinces the other boys to be on their best behavior. This all turns out to be for naught when Francis’ delinquent friends come over and trash the house. Although they manage to fix it, Malcolm gets a head injury from broken shelves (thanks to Hal buying cheap ones) and they try to find a way to pay the medical bill of $400 for him so Hal and Lois can’t find out, so he convinces his teacher to pay him off. Seeing the good work Francis has done, they send him back for military school because they realize how much he is "improving" there, much to the dismay of the brothers.

Fed up with his constant ignorance, Malcolm beats up a huge bully who won’t leave him alone, only to learn that the bully is a 7-year old brat who uses his strength to bully others. Malcolm feels guilty and tries to clear his conscience by signing up for a charity run, but fails when he trips on his untied shoe at the beginning of the run. Dewey is injured climbing a tree, so Hal decides to cuts it down, angering the neighbors because they can see their house now, but then, Hal misses the tree, so he plants another one. Francis decides to steal the slides for the military academy’s disgusting sex education slideshow, but he finds some immature slides of Commandant Spangler (Daniel Von Bargen) in his office, which he replaces with the original slides. However, Spangler shows a cunning and trickier side by showing the cadets slides of Francis picking his nose and urinating drunk.

Dewey left food for bugs in the crawlspace, and while their house is being fumigated, Malcolm’s family moves into a trailer rented by Lois’s coworker Craig. However, Malcolm ends up spending more time at the home of an upper-middle-class family who has hired him as their babysitter, but he learns that they were secretly videotaping him. He later blackmails the family to leave him alone and quits the job, also revealing a horrible secret about the family’s wife. Meanwhile at the academy, Francis finds the corpse of a former janitor in the basement of the military school, who was missing for 16 years, and teams up with his friends to give the forgotten custodian a proper burial by sending him down the lake in a burned boat and performing a burial at sea, which turns into a disaster.

Malcolm stays overnight at Stevie’s house. He convinces Stevie to sneak out of the house with him and they go to an arcade downtown, but Stevie’s wheelchair is stolen, and they have to team up to find his wheelchair while dragging Stevie in a cart. Meanwhile, to prove that he is mature, Lois challenges Reese to give Dewey a bath and put him to sleep in exchange for being allowed to stay up late to watch a scary movie, but the task proves more difficult than he expected, just as Lois thought it would. At the academy, Francis is hazed by a group of students, but tells them their tricks are amateurish to what Lois did to him, and the students decide to worship Lois.

Francis deserts from military school to spend more time with his girlfriend, who breaks up with him as soon as he gets home (finding him boring and over attached). Lois finds out Francis has left school, but does not know where he went. Malcolm discovers Francis hiding in the woods near their house and brings him food, though keeping the secret from his brothers and parents gets more and more complicated by the time. After Hal finds him, he decides to drive him across the country back to the military school so Lois won’t find him.

Malcolm’s classmates demonstrate their abilities at a picnic. Malcolm, not wanting people to see him as a freak, tries to get out of performing by ditching the picnic with Francis, but the plan falls apart when Francis meets a girl at the picnic, forcing Malcolm to find the fun on his own. Meanwhile, Hal violates the picnic’s vegetarian policy by bringing a meat-filled cooler on the picnic, and Lois takes care of a PTA control freak who strictly oversees the food and drinks there, escalating a war.

After a mishap of a steam cleaner, Lois finds out that Dewey stole a $150 bottle of cognac from the store where she works. She makes him return it, but she’s fired by a tyrannic assistant manager after he catches them returning the bottle back, and in anger she rips his toupeé off and reveals that he is bald, which leaves the family struggling financially. Francis, chosen to be part of the color guard at a beauty pageant, gains special backstage dressing room access when some of the contestants think he’s gay, which he uses to his advantage, but he is so much attracted to the girls and wants to convince the contestants otherwise.

Instead of letting the boys go to school, Hal decides to sneak them out of the class and takes them on a stock car race, and the boys try to sneak on the pit lanes, causing mayhem with the security guards. Lois’s hunt for her lost paycheck unearths incriminating items that Hal and the boys stashed around the house, and with the Malcolm’s teacher, who arrived because of his absence, she starts to collect all the incriminating and provocative items they have stashed in the following years, and the women have a great time together. Meanwhile, fed up with Spangler and his noisy dog that the students hate, he sneaks a huge snake into the academy and stashes it in his locker. To his dismay, he forgets to lock it, sending the snake loose and ending up eating the dog.

The family reluctantly prepares for Aunt Helen’s funeral, but Lois finally gets fed-up by the collective attitude and announces she’s going to take a bubble bath and everyone else can do their own things. Hal decides to listen to his old record player, while Dewey invites a friend, and after they leave a huge spill, they start to clean it, causing a mess in the kitchen. Francis is upset that Aunt Helen’s death was not reported to him. This frees Malcolm to attend a concert with a girl named Julie, but she catches him in his underwear while changing and runs away, tripping on Hal’s wires and being send into a pool of soap and trash, causing her to leave in tears. Fed up with the behavior of his parents and his brothers, Malcolm tells his parents that Reese broke Dewey’s birthday present and the reason he seemed so enthusiastic to go to the funeral was that he had planned to stash the remains in the coffin. Lois promptly decides that they will attend the funeral after all so Reese can apologize to Aunt Helen (by making him stand in the corner in the funeral).

Reese joins the cheerleading squad because he has a crush on one of the cheerleaders. Malcolm is embarrassed to have a brother who is a cheerleader, and even the Krelboynes are making fun of him, but he ends up helping Reese learn his routines anyway, and he becomes really talented. Meanwhile, Dewey wants a new toy, desperately trying to talk Lois into buying it, and Hal, hearing Reese crying because of the girl and seeing him practicing cheerleading routines with Malcolm in the backyard, tries to give all the boys "The Talk".

Malcolm wants to play street hockey on rollers with his friends on the street, but he doesn’t know to do it, so Hal gives Malcolm roller skating lessons. Malcolm becomes frustrated with his lessons and says "the F word" to his dad. Lois punishes him, but Hal responds by typing up several pages of obscene words and forcing Malcolm to look him in the eye and say them to him. Malcolm relents, but manages to do it, realizing the meaning of swearing words, and then agreeing not to make eye contact with Hal for the next weeks, and he finally learns how to roll on skates. Meanwhile, Lois throws out her back by screaming too loud at Reese for tracking mud in the house and refuses to take painkillers, and Francis fakes the same back injury to get out of a wilderness survival exercise at the academy.

Lois visits Francis at military school after he has a medical emergency. Hal, no longer under Lois’s supervision, takes up smoking his cigarette stashes around the house and stops going to work, trying to find some fun. Meanwhile, Malcolm and the Krelboynes enter a killer robot competition, but Hal takes over their robot-building project and builds a dangerous robot complete with a bee cannon. He gets crazy over the whole project, and the boys end up launching the bees on him to stop him, sending him into the tears as he is covered with bees.

Lois, down with a severe case of the flu, doesn’t realize she has spent two days in bed; thinking Monday is Sunday, she doesn’t make the boys go to school--or lift their latest grounding about breaking their bike, so the boys are unable to do anything exciting around the house. Francis calls the boys about hiding an incriminating letter about his latest mishap on the academy, but when the boys find out from Lois that they are grounded because Francis told her what they did, he decides to get his lowlife pals to get the letter, but Dewey hides it on a safe place, which, to the horror, is under Lois’s pillow, causing her to read it, also having them grounded since post doesn’t come on Sunday. Meanwhile, Hal visits a Porsche dealership and ends up ruining a car because he caught Lois’ flu.

The family takes a trip to a water park to have some fun. Lois and Hal sneak alcohol on the pools and have fun, while Malcolm and Reese have a prank war over a dispute, and they have their final showdown at the huge water tower. Lois catches them and yells at them, but Malcolm pushes her in, although she manages to grab both of them and pulls them down the slide. Meanwhile, Dewey is stuck at home with an ear infection and an elderly babysitter (Bea Arthur), and realizes that they both have a lot in common and have fun—until she’s carted away in an ambulance (whether she died or not is unknown) and he becomes so entranced with a balloon being blown around in the wind (later a paper bag) that he gets lost.