100 Favorite Shows: #52 — Freaks and Geeks
“All my new friends think I’m some goody-two-shoes and all my old friends think I’m throwing my life away.”
[Disclaimer: In January 2018, James Franco, who played Daniel Desario on Freaks and Geeks, was accused by five women of behavior that was deemed “inappropriate” or “sexually exploitative.” The full details were reported by the Los Angeles Times. Additionally, Busy Philipps, who played Kim Kelly, stated in her memoir that Franco assaulted her on the set of Freaks and Geeks.]
A comedy show created by Paul Feig, produced by Judd Apatow, and starring Busy Philipps, Linda Cardellini (as Lindsay Weir), Seth Rogen (Ken Miller), Jason Segel (Nick Andopolis), and Martin Starr (Bill Haverchuck) sounds like a six-episode Netflix series created in a lab of analytics to entice subscribers. Instead, Freaks and Geeks was an NBC comedy that aired from 1999 to 2000, earning just one season. It seems unbelievable, considering the talent at play, but at the time, they were technically unproven. And so it was that, with scant ratings and shifting time slots, Freaks and Geeks was cancelled after just one arc, presenting perhaps television’s biggest “what if?” of all-time. The story of a group of burnouts and geeks (also including John Francis Daley’s Sam Weir and Samm Levine’s Neal Schweiber) concurrently navigating a Detroit-area high school was an authentic depiction of a coming-of-age story that didn’t always go the way the characters (and audiences) expected. Even though its star burned out before its time, we will always have that one perfect season of television. Not every show can manage even that.
(There will be spoilers for Freaks and Geeks in this essay. Big spoilers. Spoilers that could even kill you.)
One cannot write an essay about Freaks and Geeks without mentioning the series’ best moment and one of the purest distillations about what the world loves about television. Midway through the series’ fourteenth episode, “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” Bill returns home to make himself a grilled cheese sandwich and pop a recording of Garry Shandling’s stand-up comedy onto the television. Bill’s in the midst of a personal crisis as his mother (Claudia Christian) has begun dating his nemesis of a gym teacher (Tom Wilson), but in that moment, he’s only laughing and chewing and shaking with convulsive humor. The camera zooms in on Bill, giving himself over to Shandling, and Apatow’s direction zeroes in on the fleeting bliss of the moment — the escapism of it all.
It’s a moment that can connect with anyone who has ever sought out comedy as a distraction and has found themselves stripping away their inhibitions and caving to the intentions of the entertainer. Bill is happy to be authentically himself and that authentic self is one that is nerdy, dry, anxiety-ridden, and happy underneath it all. When he’s himself, he’s happy.
The authenticity of Freaks and Geeks is what has driven it to all-time cult status in its two decades off the air. The “geeks” on the series weren’t just the stereotypical nerds of the era who wore glasses and giggled over each mathematics lesson. They were geeky over things like Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons, but they also loved comedy and television and all sorts of media that were rife to be obsessed over. The “freaks” weren’t just burnouts who bummed cigarettes off street corners and skipped a third of the school year. They were trying their best to navigate their teenage years and were embarrassed to show it, just as much as they were embarrassed to admit to head-banging to Gwen Verdon instead of Rush. Each character was more than their titular stereotypes, perhaps mostly because the creation of each of them was derived from some aspect of the writers’ childhoods.
The creative team clearly cared so deeply about the series. Yes, Apatow is a well-established devotee of Shandling’s brand of comedy, but he also infused his own brand of sensitivity and sardonic wit into each of his installments of the series, rather than aiming to emulate Garry’s more detached stylings. As for the cast, they’ve remained loyal to Apatow throughout their careers (not that he was owed it, but because the collaborations were so fruitful and the guidance of Apatow so clearly deft for each of them). And Feig, as documented in Mike Sacks’ book, Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers, spent weeks meticulously crafting a show bible for a series that did not even eclipse twenty episodes. Yet, even though Freaks and Geeks didn’t make it more than one season, the attentiveness of those involved is palpable in every frame.
Freaks and Geeks was a show that earnestly tackled the tropes of high school in more realistic way than we might have seen in the purest concoctions of John Hughes films even a decade prior. If the main theme of The Breakfast Club was finding yourself and where you fit into the world of social hierarchies, then Freaks and Geeks maintained this inspection with increased nuance and an extended dialogue about what it means to feel young and alone.
It was more realistic than the coming-of-age stories that had come before it and while this made for genius-level television quality at a time when such stretches were infrequently found, it still left Freaks and Geeks as a cancelled program. A program ahead of its time, but a cancelled one all the same. (Endless time slot shifting was also a major contributor.) Because of the intense realism of the series, some viewers were turned off. They expected characters to win (or, at least, in the long run, see the nerds prevail over the jocks, a common reprieve that has been parroted across decades) and instead, they were met with more of a .500 record — and plenty of cringe-worthy material, at that.
These were critical elements of Freaks and Geeks’ subversion, but it was also subversive in that it interrogated the emotional honesty of the characters to provide them with baby steps towards what they needed most during this time in their lives, rather than simply rewarding them with what they thought (and what we thought, as the audience) they wanted. Much of the series arc for Sam is rooted around his crushing on Cindy Sanders (Natasha Melnick), a student initially depicted as “out of his league.” However, when Cindy agrees to date Sam because of his kindness, he quickly realizes that dating her is boring. He’d rather laugh along with his friends to The Jerk or hang out in the A/V room with Neal, Bill, Gordon (Jerry Messing), Harris (Stephen Lea Sheppard), and Mr. Fleck (Steve Higgins).
Likewise, when Lindsay first tries to ingratiate herself among the “freaks,” she’s met with resistance and skepticism from Kim Kelly, who pegs Lindsay as a fake social climber. Over time, they find that their bond among the group is a special one. Becoming close friends, Kim and Lindsay find themselves able to open up to one another in a way that they can’t with Daniel or Ken.
While the friendships formed make up a large part of the heart behind Freaks and Geeks, the truest connection was the cross-clique one between Lindsay and Sam, sister and brother. Both siblings struggled with finding their place in high school and the friend group pockets that occupied it and both were prone to teasing one another, but they were always there for each other when they needed to be. Together, Lindsay and Sam could find solace in one another as their “fitting in” character arcs ran parallel.
In the denouement of the series’ penultimate episode, “The Little Things,” Lindsay and Sam spend a scene talking to one another on the Weir family couch late at night. Lindsay is still grappling with the mixed feelings she maintains following her break-up with Nick and Sam is debating whether or not he should end his relationship with Cindy. Neither of them come to any sort of emotional resolution in their chat, but the mutual support helps them know that even if they struggle for the next few days or months, they’re going to be okay.
While Lindsay’s internal conflict carries her through to the series finale, Sam sees the solution to his concerns manifest by the end of “The Little Things.” He knows the right thing to do is break things off with Cindy, but he’s also consistently prodded and doubted by Neal, who ascribes “goddess status” to Cindy Sanders. When Sam ends up in the school bathroom at the same time as Ken (despite the fact that they’re both high schoolers, the size difference between them helped illustrate the disparate conceptions between under and upperclassmen), though, the answer is made clear. (It’s also crystallized for Ken, who is confused about his relationship with Amy (Jessica Campbell), after she informed him that she is intersex.)
While Ken is in disbelief that Sam would break up with Cindy, he understands the motivation better when Sam explains that he doesn’t feel like he has fun with her and he never feels comfortable in her company. Realizing that he’s lucky to have this with Amy, Ken extends the empathy Sam needs in that moment, presenting a middle ground of kindness between the two students operating from different points in their high school careers. In the end, the conversation between two people with distance between them (as opposed to Sam and Lindsay, for example) proves to be exactly what they need; Ken makes up with Amy and Sam breaks up with Cindy.
The break-up, however, does not transpire smoothly. Cindy scoffs at the idea of being friends and she throws a necklace (a Weir family heirloom) back in Sam’s face, before storming off in tears. Witnessing the event, Neal half-apologizes to Sam and admits that he understands his reasoning for the break-up. As for Bill, though, he’s just happy to be with Sam at lunch again.
It’s a moment that serves as a testament to the undercurrent of comedy that always manifested to counterbalance some of the heavier events of Freaks and Geeks. As seminal as a first break-up might have been for Sam, he’s instantly re-grounded by Bill, who can only think of having fun during lunchtime.
A sense of humor, just as it’s needed to navigate secondary school, was vital to the life behind Freaks and Geeks. Bill thinks you have to lick teeth when you make out with a girl, a secret service agent (Ben Stiller) seeks therapy from guidance counselor Mr. Rosso (Gruber Allen) after pegging him to be a security threat, the Weir parents (Joe Flaherty and Becky Ann Baker) warn their kids about all their friends who committed one bad deed and ended up dead. Impossibly, it feels as if most of the jokes from Freaks and Geeks still manage to land twenty years later — even the ones that don’t feel like jokes upon first viewing.
The biggest microcosm of Freaks and Geeks’ sense humor, though, comes in the aforementioned “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers.” Here, an enamored Nick delivers an unbearable-to-watch performance of an aggressive love song for a distant Lindsay. It’s a hysterical moment, even if it is cringe-worthy (Segel fully commits), but it perfectly encapsulates the balance of humor for humor’s sake and for the sake of furthering the arcs of the characters. Even though Nick’s ballad backfires, it’s still a moment that helps him feel a little more seen. Now, this was certainly unfair to Lindsay, but like every character beat, this moment had nuance. The comedy was always about more than making us laugh; it also helped us resonate better with the characters. As such, the jokes reached further and aligned themselves with the emotions felt at every turn, showing how gifted each actor could be beyond their comedic talents.
What resonated most about the characters on Freaks and Geeks is that each of them were enduring important, transformational experiences with no concern for the sliding scale of whose problems were “more important” than others’. For Daniel, he found himself striving to buck his own rebellious streak and the lack of expectations held to him by the adults in his world. Lindsay, however, went the opposite way and wanted to rebel against the standards set for her by others, rebuking her parents’ own conservatism and desire for product placement of their own business via an ugly, ill-fitting t-shirt.
Even though Lindsay finds her path of rebellion in the form of hanging out with friends her father would consider to be “riff raff,” she only feels freest when she’s completely alone and listening to a Grateful Dead vinyl. With no parents and no friends nearby, Lindsay is able to forget about conformity and simply dance.
It’s hard to embrace ourselves and on Freaks and Geeks, when characters manage to do so, it’s treated as an act of courage, a leap to faith. In every intro to Freaks and Geeks (as the characters sit for picture day with a monotonous photographer), Nick smiles widely, but promptly allows the cheese to fall away, repressing the hopeful lust for life back beneath his exterior. Yet, by the end of the show, when he’s dancing to disco music, it’s the most clearly we’ve ever seen Nick.
In this same episode, “Discos and Dragons” (the finale), Sam remarks that he hates being a geek, but when he spends the day looking forward to a night of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s clear he doesn’t mean it. What he actually means is that he hates being looked down up for being himself. It’s a sentiment he shares with Daniel, who — after being sentenced to the A/V club and embarrassing himself by botching a projector for one of the courses — joins the “geeks” for a game of D&D, proclaiming himself to be Carlos the Dwarf and truly enjoying himself to the point of asking when they can play again.
“Discos and Dragons” builds to a montage of Nick’s dancing and Daniel’s dice-rolling, indicating their happier when they acknowledge that life is too short to deny their true selves (even when D&D is built around players pretending to be someone else). Granted, this is easier said than done, but when it comes to how we interact with others, it’s not a challenge at all. Why storm the disco with the proclamation that the genre is dead? Why mock someone for playing a game that made them forget about their worries for an evening? The easiest thing we can do is let people live their lives and enjoy what they enjoy. The characters on Freaks and Geeks didn’t realize this instantly, but a late smile is better than none.
The final moment of the series indicates these sentiments, as well. With her parents insisting that Lindsay attend a two-week seminar at the University of Michigan (to do otherwise would be “wacky”), she finally snaps, breaking away fully from the barriers of those around her. When she boards the collegiate bus with tears in her eyes, the Weir parents believe it’s because she’ll be away from them for two weeks. In reality, it’s because she’s finally betraying their trust. A plan was put in place to depart the bus early, once it rounded a few corners, and join Kim Kelly instead for a summer in a Volkswagen touring with the Grateful Dead.
It’s not an act of malice, but an aforementioned act of courage and faith — courage and faith to become her fullest self. When the summer tour is up, where does Lindsay go from here? Tragically, this will always remain partially unknown, but eighteen episodes with Lindsay Weir is, fortunately, enough to at least make sound predictions as to her future. Embracing the counterculture and her status as a “freak,” Lindsay links up with Kim, wipes away the tears, and slides on her iconic green military jacket. Of course, it’s a hand-me-down, too. And in the final moment of Freaks and Geeks, we’re reminded of this by the lyrics of the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple,” written eleven years before the year in which this episode was set (1970 v. 1981).
It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they’re better left unsung
I don’t know, don’t really care
Let there be songs to fill the air
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
