Freaks and Geeks was quickly cancelled but it launched many careers and remains revered.
The beloved high-school sitcom debuted in September 1999 and lasted one season. Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and others look back on the show’s birth, death and long afterlife.
To twist a famous line from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, the awful – and hilarious – thing about high school is this: everyone has their reasons. All adolescents are worlds unto themselves, whether they’re jerks, jocks, stoners, smart kids or underachievers. Each is an entire cosmos of yearning and hurt trapped inside a juvenile body.
Perhaps no television show has ever done as much to document those reasons as the short-lived NBC series Freaks and Geeks. Set in Michigan in 1980, it followed the misadventures of siblings Lindsay and Sam Weir (Linda Cardellini and John Francis Daley) and their respective crews of burnouts and dweebs.
Afflicted with poor ratings, Freaks and Geeks was cancelled after just one season. But it has lived on, first in fans’ memories and then on DVD and streaming, to be discovered by new viewers who embraced its zits-and-all depiction of adolescence and were thrilled by early sightings of future stars like Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel and Busy Philipps.
Freaks and Geeks premiered September 25, 1999. On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, The New York Times spoke with veterans of the show, including creator Paul Feig and writer-executive producer Judd Apatow, about an experience that, like adolescence, was sometimes painful and embarrassing, but was nonetheless imbued with a kind of magic. These are edited excerpts from the interviews.
A writer-director has many memories about the agonies of adolescence and decides to make a TV show about them.
PAUL FEIG (creator): I’m very good at recounting terrible stories that happened to me, and I have a million of them. I sent (Apatow) this finished pilot, and within 12 hours he called up and said, “I want to make this.” And my whole life changed.
JUDD APATOW (executive producer and writer): I had just finished working on the final season of The Larry Sanders Show. I thought, what if you applied all our writing standards to a show about high school? The secret thought in my head was I was still working for “The Larry Sanders Show”. We’re just doing some episodes about high school.
FEIG: It came from years of frustration of watching teen movies and shows, and it was all beautiful kids, and everybody’s hot, and they’re all having sex, and all their problems are about sex. This has nothing to do with anything that I experienced in high school. We weren’t that cool. We were a bunch of nerds.
JAKE KASDAN (director): Judd called me up out of the blue and asked me if I’d be interested in directing this pilot that Paul had written. He described the cold open to the pilot: Start on the bleachers and hear the kids talking. The characters feel more like television characters, and then you drop under the bleachers and you meet our actual characters. I just loved that idea right away.
FEIG: Sam Weir is based on me. I wanted it to be a brother and sister because I was an only child, and I always wished I had an older sister. I was walking around and saw this group of teenage girls walking on the other side of the road, and they’re all smoking and being cool. But then there’s this one girl walking behind them. She was smoking a cigarette but doing it weirdly, and I was like, “That’s Lindsay.”
JOHN FRANCIS DALEY (Sam Weir): The love between us on screen was real. We really did consider each other brother and sister, even though I might have had a small crush on her as well, which was weird (laughs).
APATOW: Paul said that it was about a girl who was trying to become an adult, with a brother who was trying desperately to stay a child.
The producers knew they wanted young performers who didn’t seem like child actors. Now they just had to find them.
APATOW: We did open-call auditions in a few cities and looked at a few thousand people.
SAMM LEVINE (Neal Schweiber): They wanted real-looking kids. They didn’t want polished young kid actors.
DALEY: When I was auditioning, I remember thinking there’s no way that I was going to get this part, because he’s supposed to be, like, 6 feet tall and gangly. But what was so brilliant about them was the second they met me, they created a workaround and shaped the character to be a shrimp.
SARAH HAGAN (Millie Kentner): I talked about being in high school and my freshman year, and probably said things that I shouldn’t have said.
FEIG: The weirdest one for me was Linda Cardellini. When Linda came in, it was the person I had imagined. I remember my ears started ringing because I was like, How is this possible? How did this person that I invented actually exist?
APATOW: As soon as we saw Jason (Segel), everybody suddenly said, “Oh, yes, that’s exactly it.” And that kept happening.
DEBRA MCGUIRE (costume designer): When I received the scripts, I was completely blown away, because Paul Feig had written this bible, which was thorough character studies of everybody in the show. I’d never seen anything quite like it, especially for a television show.
BECKY ANN BAKER (Jean Weir): I remember (them) asking us to write private histories before we ever started shooting.
Bringing real teenage failures (and real teens) to the screen.
FEIG: As much as I hate to say this – because I think it’s a really funny show – That ‘70s Show was this cautionary tale to me. It was a cartoon version of the ‘70s.
KASDAN: I wanted it to look like a gritty ‘70s thriller.
JEFFERSON SAGE (production designer): The first thing I did was I dragged out my high school yearbooks. The second one was I found the 1979 and the 1980 versions of the Sears catalogue, because the world of all these families was almost entirely from that.
MCGUIRE: When I pulled all the clothes for the fittings, there’s those ugly, puffy jackets with the ugly coloured stripes. Pretty pukey-looking colours. And when these kids would come in, they were like, “Oh, my God, that’s amazing.” They all wanted to take things home.
KASDAN: Our thought was, make the kids a little awkward in the frame – a little too much headroom, a little looser close-ups than you would see on other high school shows at that time.
J. ELVIS WEINSTEIN (writer): (The writers spent) our first week or two together dumping all of our greatest shames and embarrassments and scars from our teenage years on the table and holding them up for us all to see.
APATOW: Paul was hilariously open about every terrible and great thing that ever happened to him.
PATTY LIN (writer): I said that when I was a freshman in high school, I submitted a drawing to the school literary magazine of a guy that I had a crush on. When they published the drawing, the guy thought I was some sort of stalker, and he never talked to me.
APATOW: I remember telling everybody about one of the ways I dealt with my parents’ divorce was I started trying to learn how to juggle, which morphed into Neal becoming obsessed with ventriloquism. Learning a really nerdy skill to distract yourself or to express your pain.
FEIG: I wanted you to be in (a character’s) head going, “Everything that’s happening to me is so epic and so soul-crushing”.
APATOW: Paul felt this is a show about how you survive indignities and failures, and that you would be OK if you had the support of your friends and your family.
KASDAN: We’re going to give everybody at least an episode or two to be a little more than what they are.
JONATHAN KASDAN (writer): What I was drawn to about Freaks and Geeks was the sort of romantic angst and longing that is so much a part of being a teenager.
NATASHA MELNICK (Cindy Sanders): I didn’t have adolescent experiences yet. I had no experiences to draw from.
FEIG: You get such great reaction shots when people don’t think they’re acting, especially at that age.
DALEY: I remember seeing the excitement in Judd and Paul’s faces when they were able to get real, authentic, true experiences out of each of us.
APATOW: I remember watching him kiss Cindy Sanders, and we all realised, I think this is his first kiss we’re watching.
FEIG: There’s one (scene) where Linda Cardellini is in a classroom, she gets mad; her purse falls on the ground. She goes, “You’re going to end up using that, right?” And I said, “Yes, of course.”
HAGAN: At the table read, I didn’t know what “fornication” meant. I kept reading it, “She fornicates it.” Then everyone started laughing, and I was very confused by it.
BUSY PHILIPPS (Kim Kelly): I related very deeply to that thing Kim had, which was wanting to be loved, and not quite knowing, for myriad reasons, how to go about it.
MCGUIRE: (James Franco) wore a lot of beanies and hats, and the network hated that. They were like, “Why would we have someone so handsome and cover him up with those hats?”
FEIG: Judd protected me, because he was the vet. Wherever we were shooting on location, you see Judd off in the distance screaming into his cellphone.
APATOW: They were the school bullies who didn’t understand these kids. That’s also what the show was about: living in a world where there are certain people that don’t appreciate what is special about you.
MCGUIRE: It was network television. Had that been a few years later, on a streaming show, we would have been able to do everything that we wanted to do.
APATOW: The entire series got compressed and became almost a miniseries. I don’t think we would have done as good a job if we thought we would have a long life.
The decline and collapse of a low-rated network series.
LEVINE: I could count on one hand the number of times I saw a bus that said Freaks and Geeks or a billboard.
MCGUIRE: It was painful for everybody. We saw it die this slow death.
APATOW: We all loved the show; everybody loved each other. And it was slipping away the entire time. It was almost like a summer camp, and the end is coming.
FEIG: We had to accelerate the relationship between Cindy and Sam so fast. One episode, he gets her. In the next episode, she’s terrible; they break up. It would have been fun to let that relationship slowly die.
DALEY: I was starting to get a little taller by the end of the show, and I think they were already planning an arc for Sam where he falls in with the slightly cooler kids, creating a rift between him, Neal and Bill.
FEIG: I was very hung up on the idea that Neal becomes obsessed with swing choir. Judd really liked the idea that Martin Starr would become a jock. I was hung up on the idea of Kim Kelly coming back pregnant. The very first thing in the second season opener will be (Lindsay) being taken out on a stretcher from a (Grateful) Dead concert, because she accidentally ODs.
JAKE KASDAN: Judd and Paul made a smart decision to shoot a finale that you could put anywhere.
FEIG: I’ve always hated when shows just get cancelled, and then you never get to tie it up.
APATOW: It felt like a flashback to my parents’ divorce. I was having very strong emotions about not being able to keep the family together.
PHILIPPS: I remember having the first of many, many moments of disillusionment with the entertainment industry and how it’s run, and how decisions are made.
FEIG: I kept my pipeline to everything I went through in high school and adolescence very open, but most people didn’t enjoy those years. What I thought was going to be our strength was actually what killed us.
The charmed afterlife of Freaks and Geeks.
LEVINE: We were given an opportunity to make 18 perfect movies. We’re never going to make any more, so they’re going to have to stand on their own.
FEIG: There was no aftermarket for a cancelled TV show back then. If you didn’t go five seasons, you didn’t exist. You were just gone. When Shout! Factory put those DVDs out, it was such a sigh of relief. Because then I knew people could watch it.
MELNICK: All of a sudden, you start getting recognised again at the grocery store. You’re like, “Wait, what, who? That was like five years ago!”
SAGE: When my daughter was in high school, she came home one day and said “Hey, didn’t you design Freaks and Geeks? It’s what everybody’s watching.”
FEIG: It’s what you dream of happening with anything you make.
WEINSTEIN: It was the end of the era of everything having to be a victory and everyone having to be a hero on TV shows.
LEVINE: I like to say Freaks and Geeks walked so Stranger Things could run.
MELNICK: A lot of times, only after the fact, when something has ended, you go, “Wow, that was awesome. I really wished that wasn’t over.” But this was one of those things where the whole time you’re doing it, you’re like, “Gosh, this is the coolest thing ever.”
APATOW: There were certainly levels of it which were about me refusing to let go. It felt like something that was half-finished. The truth is it was finished and was exactly what it was supposed to be.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Saul Austerlitz
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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