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September 14, 2001/Elul 26, 5761, Vol. 54, No. 1
'Malcolm' rakes in Emmy nominations
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
The Los Angeles Jewish Journal
Michael Glouberman felt the deja vu the whole time he was reading the pilot of the Emmy-nominated Fox sitcom, "Malcolm in the Middle." "It was like someone had hidden a camera in my childhood home," says the 33-year-old "Malcolm" writer and co-executive producer.
OK, so Glouberman never tied up his younger brother and hung him on a hook. His mother didn't punish him by making him run in circles in the living room. Dad didn't blowtorch mom's dress and extinguish it in the toilet. Mom didn't shave dad's hairy body in the kitchen during breakfast.
"That would have been Linwood's mom," Glouberman says of "Malcolm" creator Linwood Boomer.
But something felt familiar about the quirky sitcom family with the genius middle kid (Frankie Muniz), his three hooligan brothers, clueless dad and drill-sergeant mom. "Mostly it was the way the brothers fought and blamed each other for everything," says the Orthodox Jewish writer, who attended Emek Hebrew Academy with his two younger brothers.
Viewers - and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences - apparently agree. "Malcolm" became an instant hit after it debuted last year, rescuing Fox from ratings hell. Late last month, it raked in eight 2001 Emmy Award nominations, two shy of HBO's "Sex and the City" and four shy of the veteran NBC comedy "Will & Grace."
While "The Sopranos" again stands out with 22 nominations and Holocaust fare predictably dominates the mini-series category (specifically ABC's "Anne Frank" and TNT's "Nuremberg") "Malcolm" surprised observers by edging out NBC's "Friends" to vie for best comedy.
The sitcom shares a thing or two with competitors "Sex" and "Grace" - shows also based on the lives of their creators. "All the humor comes out of real kinds of relationships and interactions," Glouberman says of "Malcolm." "It's not just 'setup-joke, setup-joke.' We write funny scenes. We don't feel the need to shove jokes in every two sentences."
About a third of "Malcolm's" some 12 writers are Jewish - including Glouberman, who believes he was destined early on to write for TV. "My parents say I was glued to the tube from the time I was 2," confides the witty, fast-talking scribe. "I watched all the trash, from reruns of 'Gilligan's Island' to 'The Brady Bunch.' " At yeshiva, Glouberman says he was the class clown who "got thrown out of class a lot for having a wiseass mouth."
At home, he annoyed his then-less-observant parents by pointing out all the food items that didn't have a heksher.
After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Gouberman worked the reception desk at a film distribution company and condescended on all the comedy scripts that arrived in the mail. By the age of 25, he was a staff writer on NBC's "3rd Rock From the Sun," where he helped create the story line in which the fictional aliens decide they're Jewish because their last name is Solomon. On "3rd Rock," he shared the writer's room with Boomer, who eventually hired him to work on "Malcolm."
Glouberman has since written seven episodes, mining his own childhood for yuks. One show is based on the time his parents accidentally left his brother standing in the corner all night long. Another recalls how he discovered his dad sitting in a car at 2 a.m., smoking a stogie and wielding a lead pipe, lying in wait for some teenage hoodlums. Malcolm's dad is less forbidding; he falls asleep and awakens with cigar ash all over his face.
"Malcolm in the Middle" may be rife with gross-out humor and sight gags, but Glouberman insists it jibes with Torah values. He points out that "Malcolm's" mom and dad actually love each other, unlike the bickering parents on Fox's "Married... With Children." The TV family has dinner together. The kids don't get away with anything. "I was going to say that the children honor their mother and father, but they don't necessarily do that in classic terms," Glouberman says, with a laugh.
The show is so hot that observers have wondered what will happen when 15-year-old Muniz and his co-stars complete adolescence. "For a while, they were bleaching the (fuzz) on our lips and having us drink hot lemon juice so our voices didn't crack," says Justin Berfield, 15, who plays Malcolm's second-oldest brother, Reese.
For Berfield, a Jew from the West San Fernando Valley, the relationship between Malcolm and tough-guy Reese rings true. "That's how brothers are - they pick on each other," he says. "Every day, my older brother picks on me somehow."
Sometimes, he confesses, he wishes "Malcolm's" family was his own.
"Then I would be the older brother in the house, so I could do the beating up, instead of getting beaten up," he quips.
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