Hacker Cinema
Malcolm in the Middle
2000 · TV series · 7 seasons
Created by Linwood Boomer
A gifted young teen tries to survive life with his dimwitted, dysfunctional family.
2 positive2 negative24 neutralfrom 28 commenters
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30 comments on Hacker News
Yeah thats also how I do it.
I have a cool 16 DVD/Bluray ripping rig. Even have scripts that convert ripped images into MKV's with all audio and subtitles, art, etc. Uploads into my Jellyfin.
And yes, I do buy VHS, DVDs, and Blurays. I have probably 3000 movies in physical format, and 10000 audio CDs. I also rip old VHS, which you usually cant find any torrents of. Again, I specialize in rare stuff you cant buy retail or find.
There's also illegal shows, like the old WKRP in Cincinnati. They licensed for TV only multiple songs. Pink Floyd and other artists refuse to license now. Nobody can legally sell them, even if you have the money. Piracy is the only way for the complete show.
There's also a lot more shows that languished in licening hell for decades, or theyre still unobtainable at any price. Some you can get redacted versions, but the originals are illegal no matter what. And as an (well, illegal, but I DGAF) archivist, having shows intentionally lost due to pervasive greed is just... more wrong.
The Wonder Years - finally published in 2021, LOTS of cuts made
China Beach - published in 2013 after clearing hundreds of songs. 17 segments were cut due to licensing fuckery
Northern Exposure - multiple songs redacted on republishing
Pee-wee's Playhouse - multiple songs redacted on republishing
Beavis and Butt-Head - DVD was a hackjob with dozens of songs changed/parodied.
Cold Case - too much licensed content, cant republish
Third Watch - too much licensed content, cant republish
The Drew Carey Show - massive music rights issues, cant republish
Malcolm in the Middle - massive music rights issues, cant republish
Little Monsters (1989) - massive music rights issues, cant republish
Heavy Metal (1981) - tons of rights issues, cant republish
Kids Incorporated / Class of 1999 2 - tons of rights issues, cant republish
> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes.
The licenses for the tracks expired; so they removed them. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which had been replaced with a less-impressive cover.
Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS. I haven't watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show.
Real acting, real filming. The last of it's kind.
Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.
Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
For me its more his attitude that puts me off. He might be intelligent, but his EQ doesnt seem that high. The condescending way he references the "malcolm in the middle"-episode "hot dumb girl" couldve been just the explaination of the "1 dollar = 1 million dollar".
Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot of things, but the average American home looked like Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense furbished kitchen (I’m European so I always notice that in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I’m not talking about influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries all the time, and perhaps some americans could access the number of flights that we saw in movies like Die Hard (going from NYC to SF to see a wife), but that was unimaginable for Europeans. We’re seeing wealth levels that are unimaginable, and global poverty has receded so much that the UN overhauled their definition to redirect their efforts towards human rights rather than hunger.
I'm reminded of the episode of malcolm in the middle where they bring a giant wood chipper home. And then start feeding random stuff into it...
This made me think of that old TV show "Malcolm in the Middle".
I'm reminded of the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Francis tries to study and not procrastinate:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TVs61JQv5GU
There are extremely few comedy shows I really enjoy: Arrested Development, Curb you Enthusiasm, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, Malcolm in the Middle - and Seinfeld. I think they all have something in common: while they all offer plenty of easy-to-digest but clever short-term jokes, they regularly feature completely unexpected long-term jokes, to great effect.
Seinfeld stands out because they typically achieve this across storylines. A great example (spoiler alert) is Kramer's golfing vs. George's lying in "The Marine Biologist", where the literal act of revealing that the joke was actually a storyline collision got the biggest laugh in the show's history. They sometimes even did it across episodes, for example George's job as a hand model. I think this is one of the main reasons Seinfeld nearly topped the 2013 WGA ranking of the best written TV shows [0].
Larry David became the master of this technique during the 3rd year of Seinfeld, and he further perfected it in "Curb".
[0] https://www.wga.org/writers-room/101-best-lists/101-best-written-tv-series/list
In the first season she wasn't book-smart but wasn't dumb. In season 1, episode 8 she fixes a problem with Cotton Hill's car on her own in a way that implies she is mechanically inclined and competent. She got dumber as the seasons went on. So did Peggy Hill. So did Dale and Bill. Hank didn't really become dumb but he was seriously Flanderized by way of his love affair with propane.
I have seen many characters in different comedies get dumber over subsequent seasons. Presumably this is because it's easier to wring comedy from people making bad decisions. Even Malcolm in the Middle -- a series centered around a boy with an in-show IQ of 165 -- had Malcolm making absolutely stupid decisions in the later seasons.
If you do it in a comedy way, sure, why not?
If we can joke about cops (reno 911), bar owners (it's always sunny in philadelphia), rural americans (king of the hill and many, many other), canadians (south park), italians (euro trip), gingers (south park), nerds (pretty much every college movie), french girls (malcolm in the middle), middle managers (basically, every office-based movie), bodybuilders (brooklyn 99), "aspiring actresses" (working as baristas), student cooks (usually by gordon ramsey), .... why not us? Oh and let's not forget blondes.
Do you assume all italians wear stockings and molest other guys on trains if you've seen Eurotrip (movie)? Nope. Do you assume all french girls don't shave? Nope. So if the whole of the balkans, including bosnia has many many jokes with "Mujo and Haso" (they represent a "stupid" couple of guys, where the pun is in their stupidity, why do you (I assume you're not from the balkans) get to be offended for other people? There's even a movie just with jokes about them... made by bosnians of course - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5085118/
We also have regional jokes, where in slovenia, people assume that people from gorenjska region are stingy (in serbia, it's people from pirot).
A joke is a joke, you don't have to get offended for other people.
edit: also, we don't start wars because we thing the others are subhuman, we just stereotipically hate eachother (as groups, not as individuals), due to historic reasons, mostly war-related.
ps: What you americans would call racism could only be mentioned maybe against gypsies here (eve though they're techncally the same race). And even that is mostly by assuming, that if someone stole your gutters around the house (or basically anything metal), that it was the gypsies. Usually it's even true.
Not a great list for that premise. The Amazon Lord series not only lacks stars, it lacks famous mid-tiers as well.
West World had Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, among others. These are mid tier actors that are quite well known (even though they're not superstars).
Breaking Bad had as its lead a very prominent television actor in Cranston. Malcolm in the Middle was a hit tv show that had a long run as far as TV shows go. He was already very TV-famous prior to Breaking Bad. Getting Cranston to carry Breaking Bad was them going with a TV heavy-weight with tons of experience and a deep familiarity for TV audiences.
https://kingofthehill.fandom.com/wiki/Chuck_Mangione
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_in_the_Middle
@vgeek If you have more information about the episode I would appreciate that.
What about Chuck Mangione living in the Megalo Mart on King of the Hill? Malcolm in the Middle also had an episode where a guy was living in the store for years without being detected.
This might be a bit of an odd comment in this kind of thread, but when reading this article, the concept of the Priority View discussed here reminded me of an episode from the TV show Malcolm in the Middle.
I definitely remember some of the plot details wrong, but I believe that one of the teachers hated Reese, a very dumb loser, and was purposely trying to fail him. So his brother Malcolm, a very gifted student, cheated on behalf of Reese to save him. They get caught, and the teacher presented Malcolm's mom with the choice of which child's future to save: either reporting Malcolm for cheating and possibly ruining the only one in the family with a bright future, or just failing Reese and letting a loser with no future get a head start on failing at life. She unhesitatingly said that she would sacrifice Malcolm to save Reese because Malcolm would land on his feet and be ok no matter the circumstance.
I knew those already from being flooded for 40+ years with Hollywood films (all of them) and sitcoms, I know Cosby, Malcolm in the Middle, Beverly Hills 90210, Miami Vice, the Fall Guy, Seinfeld, Friends, Lou Grant, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Diff'rent Strokes, Cheers, Golden Girls, MAS*H (the best), Married... with Children, Three’s Company, King of Queens, Family Matters and on and on and on.
Basically I know the US better - or the image it projects - than my own country.
Funnily it was a huge letdown when I visited for the first time decades ago, as it felt just like a sitcom and there was nothing new really.
Oh, is this what they did in that episode of Malcolm in the middle...
Makes me think of the episode from Malcolm in the Middle where "book club" was an excuse for housewives to get drunk together.
Sometimes you need to pretend that you're being responsible!
or played the circle game when they were kids/pre-teens. i mean, even malcolm in the middle had a whole episode dedicated to it[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glTOFPECNI
hilarious! This is like the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Hal fixes a burned out light bulb. Search "Hal fixes a lightbulb" and you'll see what I mean.
That sounds like a good example when getting pushback on estimates: "Here's a 24x36 picture in a wooden frame, how long will it take you to hang it on that wall over there?"
After getting an estimate ("15 minutes?") come back with "OK, let's plan it out. Does the picture have hanging hardware on the back or are you going to need to get some screw eyes and wire and install some? That's a pretty heavy frame, do you have good enough wall anchors? Are you going to need to drill to put them in? Do you need to be going into studs, and do you have a stud finder? How high are we going to put this? What if I decide I want it 4 inches higher? If I come back in 15 minutes and ask why it's not up are you going to want to punch me?"
"That's why an off-the-cuff estimate isn't reliable and why we need to do some review before giving a good one. Even with that review, there's a good chance we're going to miss something at first (like the steel support beam that runs down the interior of that wall)."
See also Yak Shaving and the intro of Malcolm in the Middle Season 3 Episode 6 "Health Scare"
Similar, but different - the star of Malcolm in the Middle doesn't remember that experience:
http://ew.com/tv/2017/10/09/dwts-frankie-muniz-doesnt-remember-malcolm-in-the-middle/
It's wild how fragile and unknown memories are for us. Great quote from Bryan Cranston:
Cranston said he told Muniz not to worry about what he can’t remember. Cranston starred with Muniz in 151 episodes of Malcolm. “They are still [his] experiences,” Cranston said. “It will me my job, I will tell him, ‘remember this? Remember that on Malcolm?’ What a life for you.”
Perhaps a mention of Malcolm in the Middle would be part of a more complete history. But the author uses 2007 as the tipping-point between "yesteryear" and the modern sitcom; a show like Malcolm, which ended in 2006, would fall in place quite nicely in the author's argument and not prove an exception to the rule.
I haven't seen The Simpsons in about 15 years, so I won't comment on it—except to note that it debuted only a year after Roseanne, and the two overlapped for about eight years.
Unfortunately, no mention of "Malcolm in the Middle" or "The Simpsons" (which admittedly I havent watched in about 10 years). Both of which continued the class contrasts of yesteryears' sitcoms.
Overall though, I do agree with the article. It does seem like everyone has it really easy on American TV.
Maybe because its a pattern in real life? Popularized by movies? e.g. Malcolm in the Middle.
Maybe with the 3rd wave of feminism, men feel that they must voice their problems if we want to exist in society?
It is actually that bad in Australia.
Even the Australian movie 'Mary and Max' is not available on the Australian Netflix but is on the US Netflix. What a joke.
Countless old US TV shows like Malcolm in the Middle... not available on Australian Netflix. Where can I watch this in Australia? Nowhere? Great.
Netflix subscription... CANCELLED. (as soon as proxy is blocked).
Like a lot of people have said, modern shows are very much into the everyman male lead. Bryan Cranston's character in Malcolm in the Middle, Ed O'Neill's Al Bundy, Tim Taylor playing, once again, the affable rough-though-bumbling dad.
The thing is these are all prime-time sitcoms and comedies.
There's just as many popular shows where this isn't the case. Dramas rarely have this sort of soft, incorrigible-but-loveable archetype.
I'm not super-current on my media, but Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Mad Men... most everything on HBO, Showtime, AMC, and FX run with strong, deep, emotionally complex male characters who grow and discover themselves, alongside the female characters.
And the male characters in these dramas are, on the whole, much more identifiable and aspirational.
> They think that if someone doesn't have a manager telling them what to do then they won't do anything
As someone who has moved from being an IC to being a manager, I can assure you that's not true. What we do think is that an engineer won't necessarily work on the right things. Engineers have a tendency to work on something until they've solved it, which isn't the same things as finishing it. This is why personal projects usually end up being unfinished and unpolished. Engineers also sometimes let the perfect become the enemy of the good. The oft-cited Malcolm in the Middle episode (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHpJFROEOmg) illustrates this well.
As a manager, I don't see it as my job to keep my team busy or even productive...they do that on their own. I see it as my job to keep them focused, particularly on the tasks that will provide the most benefit for the business.
Like much general-purpose advice, it's only good on average, but damaging for those more than a standard deviation away from the average in either direction. Parroting doesn't work on me, and it doesn't work on several people I've tried it on. (Other times for other people it does work, though. If you've tried it and it does, I guess keep doing it, if you've tried it and it doesn't, stop.) For kids, I observe kids from the same parents in the same household and city grow up to be completely different, and so what techniques might have worked on one child to accomplish a goal would fail for another child. I was pleased when I listened to Feynman describe this experience with his own children in one of his videos. Anyway, if I had a child I'd try this technique and see if it works or not and decide from that whether to keep using it.
The technique has been known about for a long time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening regrettably doesn't include a history section), and I see the old related gender joke of "women just want to hear their own opinion in a deeper voice" reoccurring in the comments here. My favorite relatively recent comedic take on the technique is from an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, S02E15:
Malcolm: Mum, I have a problem, I need to talk. Lois: Good, you can talk, and I will listen. Malcolm: This football player wants to use an essay I wrote for his college application and pretend it's his own. I know it's dishonest, but I might be making too much of it. I wanted to get your advice. Lois: You're hoping I can help you. Malcolm: Yeah, I just said that. So, I don't think he should get into college under false pretenses. But are they really false pretenses if nobody thinks he's smart anyway? I don't want to be a part of his cheating, but also don't want to take away his shot at going to college. I just don't know what to do. Lois: You're uncertain what action to take. Malcolm: Yes. Why are you talking like a robot? Lois: You want to know why I'm talking like a robot. Malcolm: I have a problem and I need your help! All you're doing is mindlessly parroting back what I say. Lois: You say one thing, and I restate it. Malcolm: Forget it, if you're not going to help me, you don't have to mock me! (gets up and leaves the room) Lois: (calling too late) We did not come from a family of criminals, you do not let him turn in that essay! Oh god, I knew listening to our kids would be a mistake.
Did you ever see the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Lois tries to use therapist techniques such as parroting on Malcolm? (S5E15 - page 6 http://www.malcolminthemiddle.co.uk/episodes/transcripts/english/pdf/5x15-REESES-APARTMENT-TRANSCRIPT-MITMVC.pdf ) There's another (S2E8) where Malcolm fakes a breakdown so he can get out of a dorky class thing by talking to the school counselor. (Ed: I don't mean this as evidence, just a comedic primer for the general idea.)
I think a lot of people who read HN are in the same pseudo-category. They're smarter than the people they'd talk to. They don't need someone to listen because they can talk/write to themselves--some people find that scary to do, and talking with others is very helpful! And for volunteer things it's incredibly likely a person on HN knows more about psychology than the volunteer and can help themselves more-so by learning about why they feel the way they feel instead of repeating stuff they already say to themselves to a passive listener who may just repeat it back. I think a lot of therapy is about helping people to introspect, but the tech-crowd members tend to do that on their own. I'd rather talk to an actual friend who physically cares (as opposed to abstractly cares like a volunteer or someone you pay) anyway.