POST-CANA REALITIES.

If the pope were to look for source material for a new pastoral document on marriage, he could hardly do better than to view a tape of this season's final episode of "Malcolm in the Middle" on Fox television. Yes, the same network that brought us "Temptation Island" has delivered a treatise on the value of marriage, disguised, to the untutored, in the form of just another sitcom.

Marriage is in difficult straits these days. Some states in the South and Midwest are working to stem the high divorce rate by instituting premarriage education programs for couples. New York City residents have just survived a torrid season of tabloid headlines about the Rudy-Donna-Judith Gracie Mansion War of the Roses. But there is hope: "Malcolm" attracts 14.7 million viewers and is twenty-fourth among 198 prime-time network shows, an indication that celebrating marriage--even the zany couple featured in "Malcolm"--is still popular.

My wife and I love "Malcolm." One reason is that, in a medium where sex is often the exclusive province of sculpted unmarried twenty-somethings, "Malcolm" takes the bold assumption that middle-aged married people can still find each other irresistible. Amid the turmoil of raising four rowdy boys, the attraction between Lois and Hal, the couple featured on "Malcolm," endures.

"I love the way you tell the kids to go to bed," notes husband Hal with a leer to wife Lois in the final episode, as they wait--with realistic angst--for the results of a pregnancy test which could signal the expansion of their family to an even more unmanageable five children. Of course, being the man, Hal blames his wife for the potential pregnancy crisis, arguing that she is just too attractive.

The story line about four brothers, narrated by the brainy middle child Malcolm, harkens back in some ways to my own childhood (I grew up among four brothers and a sister). Malcolm's mom enforces discipline and social conscience with an iron hand. Malcolm is told to spend time with a wheelchair-bound asthmatic classmate: "Now you are going to be friends with that crippled boy and you're going to like it, understood?" she orders.

Malcolm, played by Frankie Muniz, peers into the camera explaining his discomfort with his parents. "Just once I'd like to have a childhood memory I don't have to repress," he says.

The most appealing of the four brothers may well be Dewey, the youngest, played by Erik Per Sullivan. He reminds me of my younger brother Joe, now a writer/editor of upright professional standing but in his growing years the recipient of the kind of badgering, dependent upon the cruel exploitation of the innocence of the very young, that only older brothers know how to provide. We once concocted an entire fiction about Easter trees and Joe kept waiting expectantly one Palm Sunday for ours to appear.

Just about all the episodes of "Malcolm" have something to say about family life. Yet it's this past season's finale in particular that ought to be studied by religious leaders and legislators attempting to stem the divorce rate.

Neither Hal nor Lois is happy about the possible pregnancy, although it provides a dramatic vehicle to review the births of their four sons (two of whom were delivered on the front lawn because of unforeseen circumstances). From behind closed doors, little Dewey hears their battle.

"Are Mom and Dad going to get a divorce?" he asks his older brothers. Don't worry, he's told, they will get over it and the end result will be a mushy reconciliation. That, warns Malcolm, can get pretty "disgusting."

Dewey's older brothers continue on their various paths of mayhem. Yet Dewey is distracted, concerned as the battle behind closed doors continues and he hears his parents become more and more agitated. His look reveals (is this too heavy a phrase for a Fox comedy?) a childhood existential anxiety indicating he no longer feels safe and secure.

Inevitably, the mushy conclusion occurs. Dewey is reassured and goes back to the mayhem fostered by his older brothers. Through Dewey's eyes we get a sense of what marriage can be. One large part of ongoing erotic marital attraction, when it is lived out to the fullest, is to assure the Deweys of the world that they are safe and secure.

To paraphrase a wise saying, I would rather write a nation's sitcoms than its laws. What "Malcolm" is saying about the value of the permanence in marriage is something that state legislatures and, for that matter, church documents, are trying to communicate with much less dramatic impact and certainly fewer laughs.

Peter Feuerherd is a frequent Commonweal contributor.