When Funny People opened to a so-so box office and lukewarm reviews, people began asking if Judd Apatow's moment had passed. I'm not among those people, because I've yet to see the movie. Even if I had, I'm willing to forgive a lot from Apatow, thanks to his involvement with Freaks & Geeks. I finally watched the series over the last week or so, and concluded it's one of the best things ever to air on TV.
For those of you unfamiliar with the show: When I say I watched the entire series in one week, don't picture me on the couch with an adult diaper, watching hour-after-hour of TV in a fog. Altogether, the show lasted only 18 episodes, and NBC aired 13 of them in the summer of 1999 (and probably at 3 a.m. or something).
It's NBC's loss. Like Profit before and Firefly after it, Freaks & Geeks is one of the reasons the phrase "brilliant buy cancelled" exists. It's better than either show I just mentioned, by the way, and second only to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in terms of shows about adolescence.
It's certainly better than The Wonder Years, the show it has the most in common with (high school in the context of a specific era of history, in this case, 1980-81). In the course of 18 episodes, Freak & Geeks managed to say more about high school, and say it in a more honest, original fashion, than the Wonder Years did in six seasons. It helps that Freaks & Geeks could boast hugely authentic performances by Linda Cardellini and John Francis Daley at its center.
(They never seemed like anything but real kids, where as Fred Savage always seemed like an adult playing a kid. That illusion wasn't helped by Daniel Stern's Kevin-as-an-adult narration.)
How many ways do I love this show? Let's start with the way all of the characters are fleshed-out people, and never stereotypes. It's not one of those fake movie/TV high school worlds where the kids are always wise and noble and cool and the adults are always repressive and mean.
(The best example of this: casting Thomas Wilson -- who played the epitome of a movie bully as Biff in the Back to the Future series, as the school gym teacher. Where Biff was a menancing thug -- and ultimately a criminal -- Wilson's Coach Fredericks turns out to be an all around decent guy, even if he has little clue on how to reach the geeks.)
It's always, always honest, about school, about friendships, about relationships. It's not a show that celebrates young love (I don't think of the teenage couples here were very happy.)
I can't possibly break down every episode, as short as the show's run was. For a nicely done, detailed look at all 18 episodes, checkout Alan Sepinwall of the Star Ledger, who revisited the series two years ago.
If you haven't seen it, here's a quick primer before you check it out on DVD:
It's 1980 at McKinley High School in suburban Detroit. Lindsey Weir (Cardellini) has just begun hanging with the "freaks," a group of dirtbagish outcasts: bad-boy Daniel (James Franco), his hostile, on-again/off-again girlfriend Kim, the sweet-natured but kind of unhinged pothead Nick (Jason Segel) and sarcastic Ken (Seth Rogen, who has a fairly small role here).
(And like I said above, this isn't a world where unpopular automatically equals good. Daniel is a manipulator, Kim is a bully, Nick basically stalks Lindsey for a good chunk of the series, and Ken is so bitter that there's only maybe two episodes where he seems likable. )
Meanwhile, Lindsey's brother Sam (Daley) is trying to survive his freshman year along with his friends, the wiseass Neil (Samm Levine) and gawky Bill (Martin Starr, who basically stole any scene he was in, and seemed the most genuinely geeky of the three geeks.)
This isn't really a show about the outcasts fighting and triumphing over the popular crowd (although there is some element of that, and a few small victories that I'd rather not spoil), but about all the characters finding where they fit in, and how they fit with each other.
Somewhere in an alternate universe, you can buy Freaks & Geeks, seasons two, three and four (the show would have ended with Sam graduating high school, I'd assume). But in a way, I'm sort of glad it ended when it did.
If it had stayed true to itself, F&G's honest spirit would have shown us a world where, maybe, Sam grew apart from his friends, or Nick was shipped off to the army by his dad (Kevin Tighe, still not as scary here as he was as Locke's dad on Lost), or Daniel wound up working at a dead-end job. Even worse, the show could have given everyone unrealistic, unearned, happy endings. So I'll take these episodes as they are: an unfinished, but perfect season of TV.
Tom Coombe
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