Happily, ‘Malcolm’ Returns to Form

The season-opening episode of “Malcolm in the Middle” Sunday night was worrisome. It wasn’t simply that the episode wasn’t as funny as usual; it was that the tone seemed wrong. Malcolm’s repeated efforts to spur his father in favor of pursuing girls made him just another surly teenager, no different than his older brothers.

But tonight’s installment (8 p.m. Fox) gets back on track, building its central story line around the classroom, where Malcolm most definitely stands apart from his siblings.

Malcolm (Frankie Muniz) and his classmates in the gifted program are thrilled to be getting a new teacher (Chris Eigeman), because he is one of them--a genius from Princeton and Harvard. “We won’t have to talk down to him!” one of the kids exclaims.

But it turns out the reason he’s teaching school is that the dot.com business he founded went bust, costing him millions and leaving him bitter. Naturally, he decides to take it out on the students, whipping them into a competitive frenzy.

Such unrestrained hostility between adults and children is one of the hallmarks of “Malcolm in the Middle.” As its recent Emmys for writing and directing attest, the show has found comedic gold in blowing to outlandish proportion the psychological warfare that often goes on beneath the surface of even loving relationships.

What’s amazing is how “Malcolm’s” creative team is able to find moments of poignancy in such bombastic terrain, as tonight when Malcolm’s parents (Jane Kaczmarek, Bryan Cranston) must deal with the decision of their eldest son, Francis (Christopher Kennedy Masterson), to drop out of school in hopes of finding work in Alaska. The initial outrage--hilariously encapsulated when father chases son up a tree--gives way to resignation. It doesn’t quite end with hugs and kisses all around, but you don’t doubt that the members of this dysfunctional family care for one another.