Freaks! Geeks!

April 8, 2004

When Freaks and Geeks aired in 1999, I never watched one episode. In a certain sense, I’m partly responsible for its premature cancellation. The rest of the blame falls pretty squarely on NBC, who barely promoted the show at all, dumped it in bad time slots and repeatedly shifted schedules on the show before finally dropping the axe after thirteen episodes.

Four years and bazillions of fan letters later, Freaks and Geeks is finally available in its entirety on DVD. The set is a monstrous compilation of all 18 episodes, including a staggering 29 commentary tracks from cast and crew. I heard nothing but good things about the show, so I decided to take a flyer on the set this week, and the show is twice as good as I ever heard.

Freaks and Geeks is a teen drama about outcasts growing up in suburban Michigan in 1980, something of a Reagan-era Wonder Years. It focuses on the stoner burnouts (the titular Freaks) and the socially awkward nerds (the Geeks) shuffling through high school on the lower rungs of the caste system. My high school was about as far away from suburban Michigan as you can imagine, but pretty much every plot in the show still seemed scarily familiar. The show doesn’t really have a grand story, but it’s mostly about the little battles you have daily as a high school kid. It’s just about as realistic portrayal of high school social systems as I’ve seen on TV. Mix in copious amounts of Rush and Dungeons & Dragons, and you have a show that seems built to make me laugh and cry to unreal degrees.

The show is mostly about Lindsay Weir, an academic superstar that starts hanging with the wrong crowd out on the smoking patio. The great thing about the character is that she’s not “tempted” by some bad boy lifestyle. She’s bored and she just wants to experience something different. Even when she starts running with the freaks, she is still the reticent square and doesn’t go under some sudden transformation into a wildchild pothead. That’s what I loved most about the show. The characters always changed and did the unexpected, but it never felt strained or just for the sake of shock.

By the time I finished watching the series I was really wrapped up in all the characters, and I was sad to watch it end. The creators of the show had enough foresight to shoot the season finale early, so the series actually has an appropriate ending. In retrospect, I’m kinda glad I didn’t watch it during the first airing, because I would’ve been irate at its cancellation. This just happened to me with Wonderfalls, a great new show that FOX just cancelled after 4 episodes, and it kills me just thinking about the nine episodes of that show sitting around in a vault somewhere. I can only hope that it can get a DVD treatment like Freaks and Geeks did.

Posted in Idiot Box