Single-parent households. Twenty-something friends and roommates. Gay relation ships. Unmarried adults whose lives revolve around the workplace. Check out the landscape of American network television today, and you'd be hard pressed to find much that resembles that old-fashioned cultural staple - the nuclear family unit of mom, dad, and the kids.

But as you click the remote on Sunday nights, you may want to slow down when you reach the Fox network. Because there, airing just after "The Simpsons," you'll find one of the most successful American family comedies to hit television in years.

Be prepared, however. The concept "family comedy" may not be the first thing to spring to mind when you tune in to "Malcolm in the Middle," which has its season première on Nov. 4 at 8:30 p.m. (check local listings).

There's a mild mayhem that reigns in this half-hour take on a middle-class family, created by Linwood Boomer.

Drawing partly from his own childhood, he has created a highly eccentric family made up of parents Lois and Hal (no last name has ever been revealed on the show), and their four sons, including 11-year-old Malcolm, played by Frankie Muniz, a misfit genius who often turns and speaks into the camera as a way to address the uproar around him.

"Father Knows Best," it's definitely not. But just 18 months after its première, "Malcolm in the Middle" has already taken its place in American family television history, both for the ingenuity of the show's production and for its wacky portrayal of the ties that bind - and define - family relations.

Earlier this year, it won a prestigious Peabody award for excellence in broadcasting. More recently it received eight Emmy nominations, including best comedy series, pitting it against such long-time favorites as "Frasier."

"There's a timelessness to this show," says TV Guide critic Matt Roush, a self-proclaimed "Malcolm" fan. "It will syndicate beautifully. It will be with us for a really long time.

"This is a true family comedy," he says. "It's about the solidity of family, despite everything. These aren't model kids. This isn't model funny. They're not model citizens. But it's a funny family, and it's a loving family. And I think that's the bottom line."

All this for a show that depicts a family in a state of near-constant chaos. It features a mother who's so blunt that she often leaves her adolescent sons mortified, a father who doesn't like his job, one son in constant trouble at military school, another who's a schoolyard bully, a genius who's trying to be normal, and a youngest child who has his own slightly surreal take on life.

But it's also all tempered with love and an occasional streak of inspired sweetness. These range from Lois's unconditional support for her husband when he takes an unpaid leave from his job to pursue his dream of being a painter, to the discovery that Reese, the bully, has a hidden talent for gourmet cooking (although he's still not beyond sabotaging a fellow cook's entry in a cook-off).

"What I love about this show is its acceptance of weirdness and the love of the idiosyncratic," says Richard Louv, a cultural observer and commentator for the San Diego Union-Tribune. "It's a show in which strangeness is indivisible from love. That's truly the way families are that love each other."

Page: 1 | 2