Word: muniz
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...being shipped off to gifted class is not unlike 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...
...episodes despite the show's cost (shot with a single camera for a more cinematic look, it costs about $1 million an episode, compared with at least $750,000 per half-hour sitcom). The producers launched a nationwide search for Boomer's megabrained alter ego and found Muniz on the second day. "We were distrustful because it happened so fast," Boomer says. "Frankie doesn't have those bad habits that most kid actors have. He has a great sense of timing and is also really honest...
...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...
...show has its trendy 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...
That reluctance is where the parallel between Muniz and his character ends. Even as work cuts into his tee time--a golfer since age 5, Muniz has a 13 handicap--he relishes his 9 1/2-hr. shooting days. Still, he says, "I don't see myself as different from other kids." To ensure he stays that way, Denise has quit her job as a nurse to tend to her son, who's being home-schooled. "I want Frankie to stay a good kid," she says. "I love it when people say he's talented, but I love it more when people...