No matter how many laughs a television show can squeeze from an impish boy, cracking wise and bugging out his eyes at various oppressors, a sudden end to the laughter looms. The comedy often stops when puberty starts.
Boys becoming men tend not to play so well on camera. Fox's Sunday night hit Malcolm in the Middle is the latest series to confront the reality of a star hitting adolescence, with all its attendant restructuring of face and physique and vocal cords.
"Frankie Muniz's voice changed, and we went through that thing of `Well, now what do we do?'" recalled Linwood Boomer, the show's creator, of its main star.
The problem is persistent, with so many sitcoms and dramas based on a nuclear family with a precocious boy as a necessary ingredient. Still, the marketing impulse is clear: The kid should stay in the picture.
Like Family Matters and The Wonder Years before it, Malcolm in the Middle is a valuable franchise, unsettled by a star's surging hormones. Networks spend tens of millions to produce and promote such a series. When one has received as much help from critics and award shows and post-Super Bowl placement as Malcolm, Fox naturally hopes for something closer to the status quo ante than nature allows.
In this case Boomer instead chose to take a hard look at Malcolm's adolescence. That and a later time slot meant a 19-percent decline in the key demographic of viewers 18 to 49 in its fourth season's ratings. Muniz begins the fifth season as a 17-year-old playing a 14-year-old, and while the cast is young looking, the show couldn't keep masking the mounting evidence of Malcolm's actual age and those of the three actors who play his brothers.
On the set Muniz had sipped water with lemon to prevent voice cracks when they first were heard, but now the show has adjusted to his advancing age. "We kind of felt like no one is going to buy us artificially trying to pretend these kids are younger than they are," Boomer said.
The problem is gender-specific. Girls generally grow up on camera without losing the audience.
Boys, however, get roped off from view, as if behind scaffolding while under construction. Those actors who have had success as child stars and later as teenagers have had the blessing of good looks on both sides of the process. But even Ron Howard went into a little dormancy before adorable Opie could re-emerge as handsome Richie Cunningham.
Cody McMains, who played the kid brother in the film Bring It On (2000), went through a hormone-induced extreme makeover.
"He's a completely different person," said Joseph Middleton, a Los Angeles casting director. But sometimes the change is good for the actor, if not a specific project. Jerry O'Connell, the boy of the film Stand by Me (1986), is now the trim heartthrob on NBC's Crossing Jordan.
Middleton reminds directors that kids on the cusp of adolescence can change drastically at any point, with varying degrees of recognizability. Reshoots are not uncommon six months after principal filming. Not every acting family is like the Culkins, who seem to have another little jaunty blond boy always at the ready, like Russian nesting dolls: Whenever one grows too big for a certain role, his younger brother gets hired for it.
The cautionary tale among casting directors is that of Jared Rushton, the boy in the film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, who did just the opposite of what the title suggests. "He grew like six inches and his voice dropped an octave during the shooting," Middleton said. "In my circles it was like, `Oh, what a nightmare!'"
In earlier decades producers sought actors who were older than they looked. Gary Coleman of Diff'rent Strokes and Emmanuel Lewis of Webster had conditions that made them develop more slowly than their peers. Today casting directors rarely consider what a child actor will look like several seasons out since it's difficult enough just to get picked up for a full 20-odd episodes, much less renewed for another year.
Only one show has succeeded in keeping a kid in the lead for a decade: The Simpsons with the animated Bart Simpson. Watching Bart never mature is considered a key to its enduring appeal.
"Early on, I know that the powers that be decided that no one would age," said Tim Long, the show's current head writer. "A kid with a starter 'stache, that would just be unpleasant," he added. "You don't worry about his future because in a way he has none."
That is perhaps why Boomer's decision to let Malcolm grow up is nearly as brave as J.K. Rowling's choice to let Harry Potter grow up despite fears that the magic would be gone. Instead the two characters have opened a discussion of teenage moodiness and frustrations. The trouble starts with standard teenage-boy gripes about the injustice of parents and the fickle attention of girls.
"A 9-year-old boy yelling how unfair everything is and he's not going to take it anymore in a high squeaky voice, it's kind of cute," Boomer said. "But when you got a teenage boy with a low voice yelling the same thing, it can just seem like a drag."
To keep the teenage story lines funny, Boomer has tried to focus on Malcolm's struggles to do good even though bad often fits better with teenage impulses.
"Here's what is appealing about teenagers: an incredible amount of energy, usually a lot of idealism and a lot of commitment to the `right thing.' Whether it's shortsighted or whether it's overemotional or whether it's downright insane, it's usually coming from a good-hearted place."
Luckily Malcolm's younger brother Dewey can take on a few of the unused story lines designed for Malcolm. But Erik Per Sullivan, who plays Dewey, just turned 12.
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