By the 25th reunion, you get a good sense of how time has treated a graduating class. This is certainly true of TV’s Class of ’99.
There, in the center of the room, is “The West Wing,” that popular class president among dramas, holding court and reliving its glory days (even if some of its youthful luster is gone). There’s “The Sopranos,” the brooding film student that went on to big things, still exuding a sense of artsy danger. There are “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Family Guy,” still turning out new episodes, like classmates who stuck around and joined the faculty.
And who’s that off in the corner? Oh, right: “Freaks and Geeks.” Weird, funny kid, never quite fit in. Used to hang out on the smoking patio, played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Whatever happened to them?
In its freshman (and only) year, “Freaks and Geeks” spent a lot of time getting stuffed into lockers (or, at least, stuffed by NBC into undesirable time slots). An offbeat teen series about burnouts and nerds at a Michigan high school in the 1980-81 school year, it arrived on Sept. 25, 1999, with the praise of critics and a niche sensibility.
That combo, in the days of mass network TV, tended to mark a new series as Least Likely to Succeed, and NBC axed it midyear. The complete season aired in 2000 on Fox Family Channel, a cable destination one step up from a test pattern.
But like the homeroom wallflower who blossomed late, this bittersweetly brilliant one-season wonder aged well, into something influential, groundbreaking and — dare I say it — cool.
“Freaks and Geeks,” created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, declared from its first moments that it was not your typical glamorous teen soap. The pilot opens on a pretty cheerleader and handsome athlete in the stands at a football practice, working through some relationship drama as a generic sunny guitar score plays.
Then Van Halen’s “Runnin’ With the Devil” kicks in, the camera nosedives and we’re under the bleachers with a group of stoners — the “freaks” of the title — discoursing over the fine points of John Bonham’s drumming and the challenges of wearing a Molly Hatchet T-shirt to church. A sideways turn of the camera, and we’re with a trio of barely pubescent nerds — the “geeks” — cracking one another up with lines from “Caddyshack” and getting bullied for their shared Bill Murray fandom.
In between the two groups, and at the center of the show, is Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini), elder sister to the baby-faced geek Sam (John Francis Daley) and a high-achieving mathlete who has grown existentially disillusioned after the death of her grandmother. She questions who she is and what she’s supposed to want, and she finds herself ditching her A-student peers to hang out with the freaks, to the horror of her parents and teachers.
“Freaks and Geeks” has always been special to me professionally — its set was the first I ever visited as a TV critic — and personally. I was a D&D-playing Michigan kid in the ’80s, and I have never seen anything else on TV that so felt like it had preserved a piece of my life. But it also captured something about the turbulence of adolescence that crosses decades and state lines.
Where “The Sopranos” was cinematic and “The West Wing” had a burnished glow, “Freaks and Geeks” was militantly unpolished. It looked drab, like life. The colors were washed out. The school cafeteria floor was tiled in queasy shades of canned-vegetable green. The set dressing and design layer on every questionable aesthetic choice of the 1970s. (Explaining the show’s look and sound, Feig once told me that in the Midwest, the early ’80s were really the ’70s. Fact check: True.)
The show cast the sort of young actors whom glossy soaps would ignore — Allison Jones, the casting director, would win the series’s only Emmy — to play outcasts nurturing a hidden spark. Cardellini disappeared under a giant Army jacket; the geeks were raw and gangly; even the heartthrob James Franco, as the troubled freak Daniel, had an unprettified greasiness.
The group was a bad yearbook photo come to life, a metaphor the show played on in its title sequence. But the actors, including future comedy stars like Busy Philipps, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel, perfectly fit its slice-of-life sensibility.
The series’s chief mode was discomfort. The pilot alone is a catalog of the million little ways a teenager can die inside. Lindsay invites a developmentally disabled classmate to the homecoming dance, a blinkered act of charity that ends badly. The geeks are obliterated in a dodgeball game. In what may be TV’s most specifically rendered cringe scene, Sam works up the nerve to ask his crush to slow dance to Styx’s “Come Sail Away,” only to hit the floor with her at the moment the song’s tempo speeds up.
“Freaks and Geeks” was labeled a show about losers and losing, which may have fatally tainted it. (NBC executives prodded Apatow and Feig to give the characters more “wins.”) But it was really about the opposite: how you survive defeat and become resilient, dancing off your disappointment, bonding with your friends over your pop culture obsessions, drowning your troubles with a grilled cheese and a little Garry Shandling standup on the Dinah Shore show.
Like a lot of teen series, “Freaks and Geeks” was conscious of class, but in a more nuanced way than the typical rich-kid-poor-kid-soap. It takes place in an unglamorous town where every kid goes to the same public school and people park AMC Gremlins in their front yards. Yet there is a chasm between a girl like Lindsay, whose father owns a sporting goods store, and one like Kim (Philipps), who shoplifts there.
The show explored that difference in “Kim Kelly Is My Friend,” a key, standout episode that, maddeningly, NBC never aired. Kim, who initially resents Lindsay’s intrusion into the freak circle, invites her home for dinner. It turns out to be a ruse — Kim had invented a friendship with Lindsay to impress her parents and as an alibi to run off with her boyfriend, Daniel — and it ends in a mortifying scene as Kim’s mother discovers the lie.
The disaster ends up bonding the two enemies, as they pull off a slapstick escape from Kim’s furious parents and Lindsay helps Kim through a fight with Daniel. “You’re my only friend, Lindsay!” she sobs. “And you’re a total loser!”
Ultimately “Freaks and Geeks” was about stereotypes — hence the title — and their limitations. Everyone eventually defies their typecasting. The freaks are not so different from the geeks. The adults are not as clueless as they seem. No one is entirely the stoner, the bitch, the idiot, the goody-goody she is labeled as.
Verily, “Freaks and Geeks” taught us, the cool shall be made nerdy and the nerdy cool. In the finale Daniel, assigned to the school AV club as a punishment, ends up joining the geeks for a round of D&D — a role-playing game whose beauty is that an outcast can become a hero and a gym-class reject can be mighty. Lindsay, meanwhile, ends the season not choosing between boys in some teen-soap romantic cliffhanger but sneaking away from a summer “academic summit” to follow the Grateful Dead with Kim.
We never got to see her return; we never saw graduation day. But “Freaks and Geeks” would go on to define a mode of comedy and storytelling. You saw its legacy most directly in the movies of Apatow (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin”) and Feig (“Bridesmaids”) and in the careers of its exemplary cast.
But its wry brand of dirty realism would also echo in shows throughout the following decades, especially those that in some way blended comedy and pathos (“Girls,” “PEN15,” “Louie,” “Party Down”). It anticipated a brand of cringe comedy that would eventually produce big hits like the American version of “The Office,” but also a strain of big-hearted, indie-film-like TV that you see in niche gems like “Somebody Somewhere.”
“Freaks and Geeks” had to die so they could live. Over the years, I’ve bitterly wondered whether, had it come along 10 or 15 years later — when the proliferation of cable and streaming platforms made more spaces for niche shows to survive — it might have run for several seasons.
It might have. But had it come later, it couldn’t have been “Freaks and Geeks.” That is, it couldn’t have been the thing that was too different, too unpretty, too freaky to thrive — but that lived on, through its heirs, long after it flunked out.
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