You can really see the crumbs on the floor now.

So, the recent completion of a true remaster feels less like an upgrade and more like a cultural decongestant. Suddenly, we can see the actual lint on Hal’s undershirt. We can count the individual grains of sugar in Reese’s “Kitchen Napalm.” We can see the genuine terror in Dewey’s eyes, not as a blurry pixel smear, but in crisp, 1080p detail.

You can now see the dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight streaming through the kitchen window right before Lois loses her mind. You can appreciate the intricate, painterly quality of Francis’s mud-caked work boots. Even the infamous “roller skating through the mall” sequence gains a vertigo-inducing clarity that makes you wonder how the stunt doubles survived.

Watching Malcolm in HD is the television equivalent of cleaning your glasses. You realize that the mess was always there; you just couldn’t see the details of the mess. The high-definition transfer doesn’t sanitize the chaos—it glorifies it.

And here’s the strange thing: It works.

In standard def, the show was a cartoon. In HD, it’s a documentary about beautiful disasters.