Though averted when the kids are actually behaving, where Lois was genuinely nice to Dewey when he figured this out.He is an eccentric millionaire and Man Child who didn't spend enough time being a father to Hal, instead engaging in a number of wacky schemes and shenanigans. Hal's father was almost not a very good parent, though mostly because he was unintentionally neglectful and not out of malice.When left alone with the kids, Hal's constant attempts to make Lois' night a peaceful one get him in a state of paranoia in which he wavers all the way between being the best dad ever and a horrible troll.The family hates her so much they generally stop their infighting whenever she comes around in order to focus on getting rid of her. Every Christmas, she buys the presents for the family that they all wanted just so she can not send them, making Francis when he finds out say he used to think she was evil, but now he thinks shes insane. She is obsessed with "the old country", which seems to be some lawless part of Eastern Europe, and once tries to make Reese marry a foreign girl after going through trials, one of which was beating up Malcolm, who she has a low opinion of because she is anti-intellectual. Ida is a racist, small-minded, controlling lunatic who constantly belittles her daughters and holds lifelong grudges for trivial offenses, including against nearly everyone in the family. Lois' mother, Ida, was implied to be even worse, and probably much of the reason Lois is not the ideal mother.She can also be very childish- of her bad relationship with Francis, she claims "he started it", because of a time he misbehaved when he was a baby, though she grudgingly acknowledges this isn't a very good reason. Doubles with My Beloved Smother for Lois in regards to Malcolm. Lois is emotionally abusive because her only method of parenting is through punishment belittlement. For physical abuse, when Dewey was scared of letting go of the rope swing into the lake while the family was on vacation, Lois just threw rocks at him in order to get him to come down to dinner, and going by the next scene, she threw a lot of rocks at him either before he let go, or she threw a few rocks before he let go, and she threw the rocks even after he let go-and that's not even getting into some of the stories Francis talks about in regards to her (of course, seeing how this is Francis we're talking about, its unknown how much of them are true, although the ones he listed in Red Dress were implied to be true given what happened). Abusive Parents: Lois, aside from her well known case of Financial Abuse towards her kids, was also shown to be physically and emotionally abusive as well.Tropes used in Malcolm in the Middle include: This show is not to be confused with "The Middle" (a 2009 ABC sitcom with a very similar premise). Like many more recent sitcoms, it contains no Laugh Track in fact, Malcolm is considered (along with British sitcom Spaced) by many critics to be the Trope Codifier of the high-quality, single-camera, laugh-track-free sitcoms that viewers take for granted today. Malcolm had the advantage of being shot film-style rather than in front of a studio audience, and the added freedom allowed it to achieve a tighter pacing and surreal tone more reminiscent of an animated cartoon (although at the worst could also create a frantic, confused mess).
The show follows his attempts to keep his head down and get through life despite the social stigma of being "smart" and the rest of his family: his sociopathic brothers (whose behavior has rubbed off on Malcolm himself), his emotionally-immature father, and his overbearing and perpetually-stressed mother Lois. The titular Malcolm is the frustrated and eternally-perplexed "middle" child of a middle-class home who is discovered to have a genius-level IQ. Malcolm in the Middle is a Dom Com which seemingly set out to outdo all existing "dysfunctional family" sitcoms-and did a pretty good job of it.