Word: malcolm
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...Angelo and his crew--Brian, Pee-Wee and a third member, Malcolm--stop off at the Jackson Ward Cafe. It's a modest, cafeteria-style place. D'Angelo orders chicken, corn bread and greens, and you sit down. You have a lot to ask. Voodoo is a richly imagined CD with an all-star supporting cast: drummer Ahmir ("?uestlove") Thompson (his nickname is pronounced "Questlove") of the hip-hop band the Roots, jazzman Roy Hargrove, rappers Method Man and Redman. The music blends hip-hop with smooth soul and gritty funk. The songs don't rush to please, like puppy...
There's nothing wrong with being cut from the herd," frazzled mother Lois tells her son Malcolm, who has just tested--to his chagrin--as a genius. "It makes you the one buffalo that isn't there when the Indians run the rest of them off the cliff." That, or it makes you the easiest target for sharpshooters; whoever coined the term "gifted" clearly never received a wedgie for being a brain. As the oddball sitcom Malcolm in the Middle (Fox, Sundays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.) shows, being pegged as special is more a "gift" in a Let's Make...
...becoming a child star: you have your Ron Howards and Jodie Fosters, and then you have your E! True Hollywood Stories ("But the future would hold different strokes indeed for young Gary Coleman ..."). Nevertheless, actor Frankie Muniz, 14, is facing that enviable yet uncertain future eagerly. Like his character Malcolm, a spunky grade-schooler with a 165 IQ (he's Bart and Lisa Simpson), Muniz was plucked early, spotted by an agent at age 8 playing Tiny Tim onstage in A Christmas Carol. Several TV and stage roles later, the scrawny, blue-eyed Frankie, his mother Denise and his sister...
...exaggerated version of the Boomers in Malcolm is a breakfast-food commercial gone psycho, a battle zone where there's always one less frozen waffle than child and where three brothers--a fourth's in military school--commit hilariously baroque mayhem on one another and the house: "Leave the squirrel alone and get the fire extinguisher!" we hear in one scene. Supporting Muniz is a crack cast, especially Jane Kaczmarek as Lois and Erik Per Sullivan as littlest brother Dewey, an amiable first-grader with the brain of a turnip...
...crutches: its main device, in which Muniz talks to the viewers (now there's something you don't see every night), is its biggest liability. But the show's bratty good nature more than makes up for it. Visually antic and full of belly laughs (a rarity this season), Malcolm is cartoonish in the best sense of the word, yet it doesn't deny any of its characters humanity, even (rarer still) the parents. It's now rote to knock TV and real-life families as morally bankrupt, and when shown to the press last year, the pilot was wrongly...