Malcolm In The Middle: Life's Still Unfair Creator Linwood Boomer Pinpoints The One Idea That Made A Revival Possible

Bryan Cranston really wanted to reunite with his "Malcolm in the Middle" co-stars. In fact, the "Breaking Bad" star first approached creator Linwood Boomer while he was still traipsing around in Walter White's tight, white skivvies. 

"I just thought, 'I'd said everything I needed to say,'" Boomer tells TVLine ahead of the revival's Friday, April 10 launch on Hulu. (All four episodes will drop as a binge.)

The biggest challenge? Coming up with a story worth telling. Thankfully, Boomer had his wife, Tracy Katsky Boomer, on hand, a woman whom he credits with the idea that would officially push Cranston's revival dream into pre-production. The take: Malcolm, now all grown up, has a daughter of his own, but the real kicker? He's been estranged from his family for years and working overtime to never see them again. (The entire cast returns for "Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair" except for Eric Per Sullivan, whose character Dewey was recast.) 

Below, TVLine speaks with Boomer and executive producer Katsky Boomer about getting the revival off the ground, the joy of reuniting with their friends and cast members, and how they gave Malcolm new purpose with fatherhood.

TVLINE | When did the idea of reviving this series begin, and what were the first conversations like with the cast?
LINWOOD BOOMER | Bryan [Cranston] approached me about it years ago while he was still doing "Breaking Bad," saying we should do a revival, and it took a very long time to come up with a good idea. I was kind of fighting the idea of doing it. I very happily retired and the first show made me a ton of money. It was back when a show going into syndication was meaningful. I was kind of one of the last people. I could feel the breeze from the door slamming as I got through it, in terms of making excellent money. And so I was hesitant. I just thought, I'd said everything I needed to say. It took a long time and Tracy's help to come up with an idea that actually let me write something that I thought was worth writing. And the cast, we'd all stayed in touch, we're all friends, we all loved working together, so we all knew we would want to do it, if we had anything. And then we finally did.

TVLINE | What was it like watching these actors step back into these characters' shoes?
BOOMER | It might have been Chris Masterson who said, "This is like coming back to a nice summer camp." You have this great time and then you go away and you don't see anyone for a year and you're kinda nervous about it when you come back, and then it's like, "Oh, these are all the same people that I like" and you just start having fun. It was a lot like that.

KATSKY BOOMER | It's like you get to get away from your regular everyday lives and just go sneak [off] together, but you know that it's limited. It's like theater camp. Everyone was doing the thing that they love to do. We all knew it was going to end. That sounds terrible. That sounds like we all knew it was going to end, and I don't mean it that way. I mean it the other way! [Laughs]

BOOMER | It made it precious.

KATSKY BOOMER | Yeah, it made us all appreciate it more in the moment.

TVLINE | I'm interested in how you crafted the character of Malcolm's daughter, Leah [played by Keeley Karsten], because for better or for worse, she is very much like her dad. What was important to you when you were brainstorming what his daughter would be like?
BOOMER | That was what let me write the show. When I said I didn't do it for 18 years because I had no good ideas, that was the idea. Tracy gave me that idea. She said, "What if he has a daughter that's exactly like him?" And I was very thrilled with how miserable a kid like that would be and it just seemed like, OK, well, that's something you can write. A kid who is miserable because they're smart and because they're perceptive, and if she's a girl, she cares about friends, and cares about society and about community. If you're a boy, you can be impulsive and belligerent and kind of tunnel-visioned, but if you're a girl and you're working with Malcolm's tool kit, it's really awful. And I thought it was great that Malcolm as a father would have to see his kid struggling and sort of know it's his fault.

TVLINE | How did you find your new Dewey with Caleb Ellsworth-Clark?
BOOMER | Did you see him? It's flawless.

KATSKY BOOMER | The reason that so much of what he does is on a screen is because we were hoping up until the last minute that Eric [Per Sullivan] would change his mind. Part of the way that Linwood wrote it was, "We'll have you all on screen, so you can do the entire run in half a day." 

BOOMER | We'll just set up a camera. We'll green-screen a bunch of different backgrounds on it. Half a day is all you would need to do. I was saying, "I'll make it really easy," and he finally said to me, "Do you wanna be an actor again?" I was like, "No." [Laughs] "OK, well get off my back."

KATSKY BOOMER | But we saw Caleb. He was just on an audition tape the first time we saw him. And he came on and he looked more like a grown-up Dewey than Eric Per Sullivan did. We showed him into the audition room. We were doing chemistry reads with Frankie for his daughter and his girlfriend, and we showed Frankie the tape like, "Look at this guy that we found to play Dewey." He was like, "I wouldn't have known that wasn't Eric!"

BOOMER | He had the same ethereal quality to him that Eric had. It was such a slam dunk for everybody. His first audition, it was like, "Sold! You're the guy."

TVLINE | What was your favorite or most rewarding aspect of this revival overall? 
BOOMER | For me, it was having everybody back together. The sad thing was we had to shoot it in Canada, so we were only able to bring very few members of the original crew. People are struggling here in LA. They're struggling a little bit in Canada, too, but the number, it was 30% or 35% less expensive to do it in Canada. We tried to make the argument to shoot it here, and with that kind of money, we couldn't win the argument.

KATSKY BOOMER | We also had a great experience in Vancouver. We loved it. We loved the crew that we had. That was really fun. I was very worried about working with my husband who I hadn't worked with in 20-something years. I was like, "This could be a marriage ender!" [Laughs] I even thought that maybe I shouldn't do it.

BOOMER | I wasn't going to do it unless Tracy was doing it with me.

KATSKY BOOMER | I was like, "I can just sort of hang around and do all these things without having it be my job," and he was like, "No, you gotta really do it." 

BOOMER | I'm too old to do all the stuff that I was able to do when I was a younger man. I needed to offload it onto someone whose creative instincts I trusted. After I retired, Tracy stepped into a showrunner/producing role, and I've seen her work, so I knew she was good at it.

Will you be watching "Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair"? Let us know in the comments.