The Best TV Series You Never Saw

I stopped watching network (NBC, CBS, ABC) TV in 2001 or so. While I was in the final days of viewing network offerings, I was a fan of a little-watched and canceled mid-season show: "Freaks and Geeks." The reissue of those shows on DVD is tempting. Ruth Franklin of the New Republic claims that "Freaks and Geeks" is a rare TV series that merits repeat viewing. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia for geekdom, so be it.

[x TNR Online]
Revenge of the Nerds
by Ruth Franklin

When John Donne wrote that "humiliation is the beginning of sanctification," he wasn't talking about high school. But it's hard to think of a better credo for "Freaks and Geeks," the agonizingly honest television show about angst-riddled American teenagers that had a brief run on NBC five years ago. Set in a suburban Michigan public school in 1980, the show tracks 16-year-old Lindsay Weir, a brainy former "Mathlete" trying to win acceptance by the freaks (burnouts who listen to hard rock and hang out on the smokers' patio), and her brother, Sam, a freshman who just wants to get through each school day with some portion of his pride intact. Though "Freaks and Geeks" originally ran for less than a season, followed by a brief reappearance on cable, it generated sufficient enthusiasm to make "cult following" an understatement. (I confess to having bought, via eBay, a complete set of bootleg tapes of the show.)

For a while it looked like "Freaks and Geeks" was gone for good: As Judd Apatow, one of the producers, put it, "Try convincing someone that a program that very few people watched on TV will become a blockbuster on video." But this week all 18 episodes were finally reissued on DVD, which might actually be the perfect format for "Freaks and Geeks"--the rare TV show that benefits from repeated watching. That's partly because of its complexity: Though the show isn't overly intellectual, its character development and story progression are unusually sophisticated. But it's also because on first viewing, many of the episodes are simply too painful to be enjoyable. Critics may have called "Freaks and Geeks" a "warts-and-all" depiction of high school, but it's more like a case of melanoma.

Humiliation is hardly unique to "Freaks and Geeks"--it's the basis, of course, of reality TV, to which millions still tune in to watch people get booted off the island or dissed by Donald Trump. But while the producers of such shows go to great lengths to make the participants look like everymen, no one identifies with the women competing for "Joe Millionaire" or the contestants imprisoned on "Big Brother." The thrill we get from these programs is a form of schadenfreude, condescension's uglier sibling--and that emotion, unlike pity, can only be directed at others. But there's no joy, sadistic or otherwise, in seeing people you care about--not to mention yourself--get hurt. And that's exactly what happens on "Freaks and Geeks." As Paul Feig, one of the show's creators, said of Sam, "I'm making him relive the horrible things that happened to me."

From The Breakfast Club to "Saved by the Bell," pop-culture depictions of high school have generally foundered in cliché. But from the start "Freaks and Geeks" was admirably free of caricature. In one early episode, Daniel, the leader of the freaks, convinces Lindsay to help him cheat on a test, delivering a teary monologue about how his teachers marked him for failure early on--"How do you think it feels to be told you're dumb when you're eleven years old?" There's something suspiciously rehearsed about this speech, but we don't find out for sure until the last scene. Confronted by the math teacher and the guidance counselor, Daniel is called on to vindicate himself by completing a single problem from the test. He scribbles furiously for a minute--will he be able to stick it to the adults? But this is as close to real life as television comes, and so what Daniel is writing turns out to be not the correct answer but the Led Zeppelin logo. Boxed into a corner, he delivers the same speech again, verbatim. The adults are visibly moved, but Lindsay bursts into hysterical laughter.

Since this is a show about high school, much of it has to do with the beauty and terror of teenage love. But even the episodes tracking Lindsay's evolving relationship with Daniel's friend Nick, one of the show's most endearing characters, are largely cliché-free. Nick is a classic romantic who dreams of becoming a drummer like his idols Jon Bonham (of Led Zeppelin) and Neil Peart (of Rush), practicing on his 29-piece kit with an illuminated disco ball and dry ice for atmosphere. He approaches his love for Lindsay with similarly cheesy exuberance: At one point he ushers her into his candle-strewn basement and intones Styx's "Lady," complete with dramatic hand gestures. Meanwhile, Sam (who is 14 but looks more like 12) pines for cheerleader Cindy Sanders, a good six inches taller than he. At homecoming, he finally works up the courage to ask her for a dance, but as he leads her onto the floor, the song's tempo (Styx again--"Come Sail Away") suddenly changes from slow to fast. Sam's face can't conceal his surprise and consternation, but soon he realizes that he is, after all, dancing with the girl he likes, and as the camera zooms out they are spinning sweetly together. (The show's creators put a lot of love into the 80s period details, from the perfectly tuned soundtrack to the board games and TV programs often visible in the background of shots.)

Sam emerges from this incident with his innocence largely intact. But it doesn't stay that way for long. The death of childhood is the show's true subject, and the source of its deepest pain. In one of the more heartbreaking moments, Sam's friend Neal, who suspects that his father is cheating on his mother, finds another house's garage-door opener beneath his father's seat. As night falls, he is still riding his bike through the neighborhood, clicking at each door in search of his father's car. Bill, another of Sam's friends, might win the show's award for most persecuted character: Over the course of just a few episodes, a bully sneaks a peanut into his lunch, putting him in a coma, and his mother starts dating his gym teacher, witness to his daily torments by more athletic classmates. (The gym class scenes--Sam's clothes stolen in the locker room, a dodge-ball game that turns into a survival of the fittest--may be the show's epicenter of humiliation.) The freaks, too, get their share of torture, especially Kim, Daniel's girlfriend, who endures a home life so wretched that NBC initially refused to show the episode that depicts it.

The writers did their best to be true to the yin and yang of the show's title, but their hearts were clearly with the geeks. The result is that the freaks feel a little less true-to-life. In the final episode, for instance, Daniel spends a happy evening playing Dungeons and Dragons with Sam and his friends. The subtext is believable enough--one of the show's main themes is that the line between freak and geek is more porous than it appears. But it strains credulity to imagine Daniel even sitting at the same table as these kids, much less laughing with them over a can of diet Faygo.

These sour notes occur more than once in the last few episodes, in which a new theme starts to emerge: the redemption of geekdom. During a game of "Seven Minutes in Heaven," the beautiful head cheerleader grabs Bill and French-kisses him. One of the bullies confesses his secret desire to accompany the geeks to the science-fiction convention. Even Lindsay turns her attention to Neal's older brother Barry, a college student who is really just a grown-up geek. Why the shift? The show's low ratings seem to have had something to do with it. "I love the characters," Garth Ancier, NBC's president for entertainment, was quoted as saying in a New York Times piece about the show that ran in January 2000, just as "Freaks and Geeks" was moved from its original slot--8 p.m. on Saturday night--to one where it might have more of a chance. "I just want them to have less depressing lives. We felt they needed one decent-sized victory per episode."

This new direction might indeed have saved "Freaks and Geeks"--we'll never know, because the show was killed after episode 13, in which Lindsay smokes pot for the first time. ("Man, no wonder we got cancelled," Apatow writes in the DVD liner notes.) The happy endings do make the show a bit less excruciating to watch. But they contradict the very spirit that makes it so original. If Feig and Apatow had stayed true to their vision rather than trying to fit in, at least "Freaks and Geeks" would have been spared one last humiliation.

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at TNR.

Copyright © 2003, The New Republic