Freaks and Geeks

Tell me, what was your general choice of a social group like back in your high school years? May you have been in the same group of people as the loners, the geeks, the jocks, the A-students, whatever? Who knows what? Whatever you make of high school society, there would always have been so many different cliques and groups that you felt more like you belonged in. In a way, I elaborated on that with The Breakfast Club, showing how each supposed stereotype carried some emotional baggage because of what was expected of them.

It’s come to my attention that, on a communal level, probably the best place to start in terms of how such high school groups did their own thing on a regular basis would be Freaks and Geeks.

Having premiered on NBC in 1999, this show has been celebrated not only as one of the all-time greatest high school series, but also as one of the most fantastic shows canceled too soon or cut too short — just like My So-Called Life, another high school classic that I reviewed. Because I’d already relished My So-Called Life for its achievements in sensible high school storytelling, I became compelled to see what Freaks and Geeks had to offer that made it such a breakthrough in that field.

There are plenty of things I can report that worked so well in this show. Let’s start with the story.

This series, set at William McKinley High School in Michigan in 1980, followed the lives of multiple high schoolers, many of whom began to form their own groups and social circles. And in the center of all this chaos were two siblings, Lindsay and Sam Weir. Both of them were going through life in high school, just worrying about their day-to-day difficulties and dilemmas. Lindsay was a former mathlete who later questioned her life choices, and because of that, she began to naturally mingle with the, quote, freaks — the people who were dismissed by others for their unusual attitudes or points of view.

Meanwhile, Sam, because of his deep knowledge of specific points of interest, like comedy, ended up spending more time with the geeks — the people who knew a lot about such subjects but struggled with their social lives. In Sam’s case, though, that may not have been true of him, for he had a fairly decent relationship with people like Cindy Sanders, one of the high school cheerleaders. But when it came to his businesses with Neal Schweiber and Bill Haverchuck, only then did he gradually live up to his image as a geek.

And if that’s not interesting enough, get a load of this. Lindsay, upon her settlement with the freaks, started to become more comfortable among some of the members of the group, especially Kim Kelly, who was trying to get by after struggling from being part of a severely dysfunctional family life, and especially with Nick Andopolis, a drummer wannabe who Lindsay was starting to have a deep crush on, but also always flunked most of his classes. What challenges would’ve awaited Lindsay and Sam in their school lives, and not just with their parents’ lives?

On the surface, it may seem like a basic high school series. But the show went above and beyond the call of duty by chronicling the characters’ experiences, whether alone or with their friends, as authentically as possible. Even the general writing and the characters’ dialogue felt about as authentic as you would expect from teenagers, and not just the adults. Even in situations where they were expected to generate a laugh, there was enough groundedness from the characters to highlight how adults and teenagers would normally have spoken, especially to each other.

But now, there were a few things about the show that stood out to me. The easiest one to start with is the casting.

Of all of the hallmarks for which Freaks and Geeks became famous, its casting might have been among its biggest achievements. Not only did every one of the actors and actresses work together very naturally — not just fluently — but get a load of some of the actors who got their big break in this show and would eventually have grown to become iconic movie stars. Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel. These people, among the show’s main stars, would all have gone on to achieve immense success in other forms of entertainment thanks to what they unleashed here.

Seth Rogen was about as iconic a comedian as can be. Jason Segel became a decent actor on his own, especially after starring in movies like The Muppets. James Franco became a dignified actor in his own right, especially with films like 127 Hours and the entire Spider-Man trilogy. And Linda Cardellini proved herself quite capable and talented as both an actress and, especially, a voice actress. You remember her role as Wendy Corduroy in Gravity Falls?

When you see these actors give it their all with their roles and performances in this show, you can see just why they went on to become such recognizable superstars.

One of the biggest reasons they worked was not just what two or three of the actors brought to each other when they did their thing in the show, but also what they managed to bring to each other every time, especially when it came to high school or specific groupings of people. Whether it’s Lindsay with the freaks or with her parents, whether it’s with Sam and his group and or his parents and his sister, there’s just so much chemistry going on between them all that I ended up admiring their collaborative efforts and just what kind of special team they formed along the way, even if some people were hopping back and forth between different teams. What the actors brought to each other in The Breakfast Club, I felt in pretty hefty abundance here with Freaks and Geeks.

When Freaks and Geeks was recognized at the Emmys, it landed two nominations in writing, one for its pilot episode, and one for ‘Discos and Dragons’ – I’ll get to that very soon – and ended up winning one Emmy Award for its casting. That, in my opinion, was a given, because it was that well put together.

But it’s one thing to judge the actors based on their collaborative efforts. What does that say about their individual performances?

Well, I’d say the individual performances were just as strong as the collaborative ones. And what each actor brought to the table seemed as interesting as what they brought to each other.

Starting with Linda Cardellini, she captured the low-key, somewhat dispirited and disinterested, yet still easygoing, vibe with Lindsay Weir. What Lindsay went through during high school made her look dejected and uncertain about what to make of her priorities after her accomplishments as a mathlete. And what Cardellini unpacked helped convey Lindsay with as much regularity and sympathetic qualities as she could have. But Cardellini was also excellent at conveying enough emotion through Lindsay’s character to clue me into her innermost dilemmas and debacles, and she made me see exactly where she stood concerning her commitments to others, whether they be her friends, her family, or whoever else caught her interest.

Of course, I am honestly pretty impressed with Busy Phillips’ performance as Kim Kelly.

She definitely had that ‘tough girl’ vibe about her and usually conveyed it as such when not being too sarcastic or bossy. But whenever she was at her most mellow, that’s when she allowed her character’s inner humanity and insecurities to shine through. When I first saw Kim in the show, I was a little worried that she was going to be one of the more detestable characters in the show because of her attitude and her tendency to look down on others, much like what you’d expect from most ‘queen bee’ characters. However, once Busy Phillips got more settled into her character, especially after the episode ‘Kim Kelly is My Friend’, that’s when her performance and body language clued me in to exactly who she truly was and what she’s been struggling with. Phillips was terrific in portraying some of the classic snark usually associated with girls her age, but once her character’s more human tendencies were out in the open, she never went back.

Seth Rogen’s performance as Ken Miller perfectly embodied his character’s stereotypical facade, with his loud, manly voice and awkward expressions. Seth Rogen practically fit his character like a glove as he went about his business with his friends or on his own, with his general sense of sarcasm and quick wit in response to what others said or did about certain situations.

Jason Segel surprisingly expressed a wide range of emotions every time he played Nick Annapolis. At times, he played him like an easygoing guy who was into drumming and willing to give it his all. But at other times, he expressed Nick with just enough angst and conflict to clue me in to where his priorities truly lay. It’s this wide range of emotions that breathed more life into Nick and made him a more interesting character than I would have expected.

James Franco surely captured some of the ‘bad boy instincts’ with his character, Daniel Desario. But he was also excellent in capturing his general indifference alongside it. Whenever you see him in action throughout the show, you can tell the character he played was the kind of guy who didn’t take many situations in life very seriously. And that, despite what his experience would have told us of him, his general lack of concern or interest in what he had done or what he was expected to do clued me in as to how he generally handled his dilemmas.

I’m also fond of the actor, Joe Flaherty, who played Lindsay and Sam’s father, Harold Weir, with his uptight attitude, his weird ways of looking at life, and his sometimes pompous, sometimes genuine demeanor. He definitely played the father character with enough comedic beats to make him witty, but also grounded enough to make me look at things from his point of view and understand why he saw things and people the way he did.

I also think the acting was one of the show’s strong points, because even if some of the characters were not as interesting as others, some actors went all out in playing their roles with the utmost dignity necessary to arouse interest in them. And I'm talking about more than just the actors who played Sam, Neal, and Bill.

For example, Lindsay and Sam’s mother, Jean Weir, was not particularly interesting in her own right. Yet, actress Becky Ann Baker’s modesty, sometimes contented and sometimes frustrated attitudes, and ways of looking at things from her own point of view instead of those of others helped express Jean in a more instinctive, generally modest way to a point where it felt refreshing compared to those of the performances of the other actors.

I also admire the actress who played Cindy, Natasha Melnick. There was not enough written about her to make me wonder what the big deal was with Cindy. But whenever Melnick played her character, I felt like I had known her for quite some time because of how easygoing and modest she made her seem.

I also have to give props to the actor, Jerry Messing, who played Gordon Crisp. For several episodes, he was built up to be just a sleazy student who always had gross ways about doing his business. And yes, his slobby mannerisms convinced me that he would not have been a bright student. But when he was assigned to Sam as a lab partner on one of their science experiments, Gordon revealed just how much he knew about what Sam wanted and what his friends thought of him, but never to the point where he was mad at Sam. In fact, he reacted to Sam’s instincts and uncertainties with contentment and humility.

I also tend to look back with admiration on Dave ‘Gruber’ Allen’s performance of Jeff Rosso, the guidance counselor. Similar to Joe Flaherty as Harold Weir, Allen excelled at letting Rosso deliver well-intentioned, if not eccentric, lectures on life and personal struggles to whichever students he spoke to. But in his case, he also conveyed the excitability of an inner child as Rosso fondly reflected on his younger years. When we later see how part of it was because he was a former rebel in the late 60s, this background helps paint Allen’s performance and Rosso’s character in a more flavorful, multi-faceted light.

The show was even considerate enough to rope in some other well-established stars. In ‘Carded and Discarded’, when the geeks were seeking out fake IDs, they met a disco store clerk who knew how to issue them, played by none other than Jason Schwartzman. There’s just something about his voice that snuck in a little bit of a crafty notion to his actions, and it worked.

And in ‘The Little Things‘, around the time Mr. Rosso’s history as a rebel was made out in the open. It was elaborated on further by one of the secret agents who came to promote the then-Vice President George Bush’s upcoming speech to the school, and he was played with utmost modesty by Ben Stiller. And for what he brought to his role, he surprisingly did wonders in making this character mean serious business without going too far and making him unlikable or demeaning. Stiller played his role with just the right amount of leeway to make him pleasantly committed.

That’s what I mean by some actors injecting their otherwise standard characters with more intrigue because of how they reacted, how they spoke, and how they emoted under certain circumstances.

I also want to give props to what kind of a late-70s, early-80s aesthetic the show brought to the table. With Lindsay and her group — the freaks — they were usually into music and talked about the singers, bands, and music they listened to. Sometimes, they even played it on records, which I cannot help but feel might have been out of the norm, except I figured that either records were still a thing back in the late 70s, early 80s, or they were just left over from their parents when they played records as frequently as they would have. Sam and his group talked quite extensively about comedy, including what they considered first-rate comedy and plain hilarious moments. They always spoke about M*A*S*H, the TV show, and even Bill Murray, when he was getting his big break on SNL. They even gushed about Steve Martin when he was getting his big break with The Jerk. Many such low-key details caught the protagonists’ interests. Whenever they elaborated on their fascinations with passion, it clued me into exactly what they were diving into at that time, what was all the rage back in 1980, and just what was a big deal to whom.

After going on and on about the casting and the acting, how did the characters fare?

Starting with Lindsay Wier, she, as I said, was a generally easygoing girl with varying levels of commitment to her, not just academically but also socially. By deciding to go from being one of the most accomplished mathletes in William McKinley High School to suddenly being in the same group as one of the more unusual or downtrodden students in school, she hinted at a particular negligence on her part in terms of where she wanted to end up and what she wanted to do that would have made her happy.

I will admit, I don’t remember exactly why Lindsay decided to disengage from the mathletes — especially her longtime friend, Millie Kentner — and hang out with the freaks instead. I don’t even know what Lindsay connected to them over, even. However, I kept thinking back to how Angela Chase decided to disengage from her longtime friend, Sharon, and spend more time with Ricky and Rayanne in My So-Called Life. Maybe there’s just something about the two classmates that was unexplainable, but still pretty pleasing, and spoke to Angela more. With Lindsay in Freaks and Geeks, because she was leaving behind something that made her an exceptional student in school, you can say that it made Lindsay look more like a rebel by comparison.

Her brother Sam, on the other hand, felt like the more responsible of the two siblings. At least, as far as big-scale commitments were concerned. He’s usually more sensible and was always mindful of his place in high school society and what he intended to do with his friends, Neal, Bill, and, at times, Harris Trinsky, every time they had to figure out how to stand out in the crowd for good reasons rather than for their innate reasons.

Both Nick and Daniel were generally sleazy characters, but they differed in their personal commitments.

Nick had been constantly flunking his classes at school, but that was mostly because he was more focused on becoming a professional drummer. It did cause some friction, of course, not just with his bandmates – mostly pertaining to the ‘freaks’ – but also with his father, who caught wind of him constantly flunking his classes and did something drastic to his drum equipment that caused a rift between them at one point. So, whenever you think of the conflict between the passion for the arts and commitment to the essentials, you can feel it in Nick’s struggles in this show.

Daniel definitely felt like an odd duck. He was generally more dispirited about the cards he’d been dealt than his peers, especially Lindsay. So that would partially have explained his general negligence in his studies. Sometimes he expressed a level of dignity to him, but not to the point where he would have been what you would call a high-ranking man.

Sam’s best friend, Neal, felt like the most outspoken of the geeks. He was usually the brains behind whatever schemes the geeks attempted to pull off, and would always have tried to make it go the way he believed it would for him and his buddies. Other times, he admitted to having a crush on Lindsay, so that threw in some juicy dynamics between Neal, Sam, and Lindsay whenever that was brought up. In terms of comedy, he was shown to have a knack for ventriloquism, but it was partly borne of his innermost frustrations with his parents’ lives, particularly their potential infidelity.

Bill, in my opinion, might have lived up to his geeky image. But even with that classic personality apparent, there were times when he began to reveal some angles that would have left me reevaluating his reputation. Take, for example, his inner sense of snarkiness and his attempts to toughen himself up physically, even if part of that was brought down upon him by his gym teacher, Mr. Fredericks.

Ken usually said or did very little throughout the show. Still, whenever he spoke or chipped in with his two cents, he was usually the wisecracker, making remarks that either shed light upon the current conditions he was witnessing or would have suggested a particular way to handle things in front of him. But what made him so memorable, again, was Seth Rogen’s performance.

Besides the excellent deliveries Joe Flaherty gave to Harold Weir, the character himself was a generally unorthodox father figure who came up with some of the weirdest explanations for how certain life elements would have gone down, as he believed they had. But other times, he would have revealed himself as a more thoughtful and understanding father than his generally unseemly attitude would have suggested. And while his wife, Becky, didn’t do or say much in the show, I could tell she was typically the sensible one in the family.

Whenever I saw Lindsay’s old friend, Millie, enter the scene, I didn’t think much of her. I just remembered her conveying a more modest disposition than Lindsay or her friends had shown. But I still found it interesting to lend an ear to her convictions regarding Lindsay, her allegiance to her fellow mathletes, including her, and, due to past connections, what that would’ve said about Lindsay’s decision to align herself with people different from those she usually hung out with. As I laid out earlier, she felt like she was to Lindsay what Sharon was to Angela in My So-Called Life.

One of the most interesting characters I remembered from the show was the school counselor, Mr. Rosso, who was more straightforward about life lessons than Harold, but just like Harold, tried to be as reasonable about them as possible. Yet, as ‘The Little Things’ would have revealed, he was a rebel in the late 60s, which made a dent in his track record. Later, as he gave his students lectures on his background in music, it seemed as if he was rambling about the genuine artistry behind the music he admired, in a way that was different from how the Freaks enjoyed it. But the Freaks eventually discovered him to be one of the band members of Feedback, a band they wanted to see so badly, highlighting the more implicit and genuine aspects of Rosso’s character that made him arguably more than meets the eye.

Of course, while this series has shown the characters as they were, that doesn’t mean it didn’t tinker with some of their characterizations. When Kim Kelly and the bully Alan White showed up, I looked at them with consternation, because they automatically left a bad first impression on me, Kim for being so high-and-mighty, and Alan for being your everyday bully. But later in the show, it showed that even these guys had their own insecurities.

Alan was portrayed in a negative light because he always chased Sam and his friends down whenever he got the chance. But we started to see more of him in ‘Chokin’ and Totin’, when he played a prank on Bill and snuck peanuts into his sandwich after thinking that Bill was joking about his peanut allergy. However, as soon as Bill ate his peanut-studded sandwich, he had a severe allergic reaction, bad enough to send him to the hospital. And shortly after, Alan came to the hospital to see Bill. Alan went to the hospital to see Bill because his dad told him to, right?

Not so. It turned out that it was Alan’s idea to go to the hospital to see Bill, out of remorse for his prank. When he finally got his chance to see Bill in his bed while he was unconscious, Alan opened up and told him that he wanted to be like him and his fellow geeks, but ended up rebelling against them after they unknowingly gave him the cold shoulder one too many times. That was some pretty deep and unexpected characteristics to expose from someone who’s typically a bully.

With Cindy, the high school cheerleader with whom Sam shared a deep friendship, her characteristics went the other way around.

The details that would eventually have been unearthed about her character in the show would have made for an essential reevaluation when they came to light. Throughout a good chunk of the show, I remember looking at Cindy as just a nice girl whom Sam must’ve been lucky to be such good friends with, since she was a cheerleader. Of course, I didn’t remember very much else of her outside of that, so I only looked at her with fondness, despite her being generally flat and modest compared to most of the other characters in the show. However, when Sam and Cindy decided to take it a step further and become boyfriend and girlfriend, Sam suddenly began to notice things about Cindy he did not anticipate, and it ultimately tested their relationship. For example, Cindy was not a big fan of movies like The Jerk, which Sam and his friends thought was one of the most hilarious comedies ever, and she had all these ideas of what she and Sam could’ve done together, to the point of disregarding Sam’s suggestions. In a way, it revealed a slight vanity in Cindy that began to turn Sam off the more he noticed it. Much like with Alan, this show did a good job of taking what we would generally see as typical high school stereotypes and giving them more depth beneath our surface-level impressions than we’re used to.

Let’s hop back to Gordon and why he stood out so much to me. The first time he was shown in the series, Sam and his friends were wary about him because all he did was pick his nose, scratch his back, and the like with his pencil, and also smelled pretty bad, too. To them, Gordon would have been looked at as this one guy who had no sense of manners or hygiene. Of course, it was not until Sam was assigned to be his lab partner on one of their science experiments that he hoped to have Cindy instead. At first, they looked at each other awkwardly. But then Gordon surprised Sam by revealing what a decent guy he was — well-spoken and quite savvy about what he noticed among his friends and classmates, including Sam’s desire to be with Cindy. He was even aware enough of such circumstances to give Sam good advice on what to do for Cindy. From then on, Gordon got along more with Sam and his buddies. And as for his bad smell, it may have been a regular thing with him, but his mother once told him that it would have sorted out who would’ve wanted to be friends with him, notwithstanding his smell, and who would’ve been too turned off by it. In short, his bad smell was a blessing in disguise.

This kind of characterization was one of the more surprising elements to be gained out of this series, where you’d think you know this one person, only to discover other elements to them that you never even thought about before that made you look at them differently. And while Cindy and Alan caught me off guard with the other aspects of their personalities, Gordon is one of my favorites because he turned out to be far more decent than he was made out to be.

In addition, I did not expect Mr. Fredericks to be such a fascinating character. Of all the teachers and staff members I got to know from William McKinley High School, aside from Mr. Rosso, there’s just something understated yet nuanced about this guy that makes him seem pretty multifaceted.

Usually, he seemed like a generally tough-as-nails gym teacher who always pushed his students, including Sam, Neil, and Bill, to their limits, often with bickers or yells. However, beneath all his bark, he would’ve turned out to mean well and tried to push his students to do better. Other times, He also substituted as the science teacher. While he didn’t do it as forcefully as back in gym, he still harbored a bit of a no-nonsense attitude towards his students, but he also showed a more tender side to some of them at their most vulnerable. At first, he showed it to Sam when he was struggling with exams about breasts, but I will elaborate on how else he was memorable for that soon.

But the one character who started on uneasy ground, only to win me over wholly, was Kim Kelly. And it all started with one of the best episodes in the show, ‘Kim Kelly is My Friend’.

Kim started as just a regular, bossy girl in school, and within the first few episodes, I saw her as nothing more than that. But once Kim took Lindsay out to meet her family, even if it was mostly to give her parents the impression that Lindsay was a greater role model in school than she really was, it would’ve revealed what insecurities Kim had to grapple with back home when she wasn’t busy with her struggles in school, such as her relationship with Daniel. The longer she upheld her alleged attitude, the more I began to acknowledge how responsible she tried to be when she was caught in the middle of such chaotic circumstances. While I still look back fondly on Kim for her pleasantly uptight attitude, it was her struggles that made her human.

I should also pay attention to the writing in this show, because it did offer some very creative scenarios and clever solutions to the main characters’ problems. Of course, as fun and neat as the first half of Freaks and Geeks was, the last half was filled with unanticipated turns and events, with surprisingly deft episodes that made Freaks and Geeks go from being a great show into an incredible one.

One of the episodes that stood out to me the most is ‘Beers and Weirs.’ In this episode, Lindsay was talked into hosting a party at her house by her friends while their parents were away in Chicago for the weekend. But Sam was against the idea, not just because of what their parents asked of them during their absence, but also because of the likelihood of property damage from parties the likes of which Lindsay and her friends planned to host at their house. So what did Sam and his friends do? If you can believe it, they snuck into the party in secret and swapped out the kegs of regular beer with kegs of nonalcoholic beer. In which case, it left the partygoers, and Lindsay, too, feeling genuinely drunk on the beer they enjoyed, when really they drank only the beer, not its alcohol, resulting in what would’ve been generally described as the placebo effect.

And let’s not forget ’Kim Kelly is My Friend’. Besides being one of the few episodes of the show to have not aired on NBC first – it aired on Fox Family Channel later in 2000 instead, along with ’Noshing and Moshing’ and another episode that I will address shortly – this was where I personally began to have a soft spot for Kim after being wary of her over the past couple of episodes prior. She started as her usual thorny self, but by the time the audience was given a more in-depth look at her family life, mainly through Lindsay’s eyes, I went from being on high alert for her to feeling sorry for her. It’s just hard to imagine what kind of lifestyle she had with her parents constantly bickering and accusing Kim of doing something wrong. Her brother ending up in a car accident that left him mentally disfigured was also just another of the primary misfortunes that she and her family dealt with, so who would not have sympathized with Kim after catching on to these key details in her life?

But if I had to pick my absolute favorite episode – and yes, this was from the show’s last half of its run – I would choose ’Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers’. Having also aired on Fox Family Channel instead of NBC, this episode still carried the same comedic beats as the rest of the show, but the human elements, both on the freaks’ and the geeks’ sides, were conveyed with just an equal amount of gravitas to help them balance each other out. This episode hit two birds with one stone, looking at devastating events and conveying them with the appropriate emotional weight, but not without throwing in some witty elements.

From the freaks’ side, Lindsay and Kim were out driving to head to a nearby concert, where The Who would’ve performed, when they heard a big noise coming from outside the car. The next day, they ran into Millie, who was crying because her dog, Goliath, had been run over. But as Millie explained, Lindsay and Kim became horror-stricken when they put two and two together and realized Goliath had died in the same spot where they had heard that big bang. In other words, Lindsay and Kim were the ones who ran over Goliath, and by accident. So, you can tell just how torn Lindsay and Kim were about telling Millie. Lindsay, because she was likely to break her best friend’s heart, and Kim, because Millie was slowly becoming one of them, and Kim was starting to like having Millie around in their collective social circle. And it’s especially challenging when Millie was also a fellow mathlete who was on Lindsay’s side before Lindsay switched places with the freaks.

On a side note, Kim also sympathized with Millie because she, too, had a dog once. But how miserable can you get when she came home one day to find her dog put to sleep by her family behind her back? That actually makes running the dog over by accident look like a mercy killing!

From the geeks’ side, Bill had a hard time trying to prove himself physically capable in gym class. However, it got even messier when he discovered that his mother had been dating Mr. Fredericks for a while, and that Fredericks was on his way to go from being his teacher to being his stepfather. Having known all too well what typical nastiness Bill had to put up with from him at school, Bill wanted none of it and even tried to split him and Mom up. Having already known Fredericks’ softer side since before that episode, it was fascinating to watch Bill attempt to understand what would’ve led to his mother dating one of the last people he expected or wanted to have settle into his life forever.

What’s more, Martin Starr lived up to his geeky image as Bill throughout the whole series, but this episode was where I remembered him being at his most childish and even emotional in this episode because of all the conflicting elements he had to grapple with. His inflections helped make me sympathize with Bill‘s struggles when I wasn’t wrapping my head around his nerdy image.

Now, let’s talk about the show’s final episode, ’Dragons and Discos’. In this episode, the characters were nearing the end of the school year, and some were off to different destinations because of where they landed academically and socially. For one thing, Daniel, after flunking so many of his classes, was on the brink of having to repeat his past year of high school. Because of that and his indifference towards that, he ended up intermingling more with, of all people, the geeks – Sam, Neal, and Bill – when he was sent to the study room to catch up on studies. There, they both slowly started getting along to the point where Daniel was invited to play Dungeons and Dragons with them.

Meanwhile, because of her academic achievements as a mathlete, Lindsay was nominated to spend two weeks at the University of Michigan. But Lindsay thought it was just too much, too soon, and was more willing to stick to her usual activities in life, especially with the freaks. And this happened even as she was questioning her relationship with Nick, whom she had grown to like very much. But after hitting it off with him the first time, she considered taking a break from their relationship because of what they were both dealing with individually.

And, ultimately, the episode and the series ended with Lindsay deciding to hop on a bus to Michigan so she could spend the next two weeks at the university. But then, the next thing we knew, she got off around the corner, and what she was really doing was getting together with Kim and some of their friends in what looked like a hippie van as they drove off to Colorado instead, as they prepared to catch The Grateful Dead in their next concert. I was not expecting that to be the finale, let alone the very last thing we saw of Freaks and Geeks, but it did highlight what kind of life goals the characters had and what they were about to do next as they prepared for the summer. It had that slight bittersweet feel to it, not just because of Freaks and Geeks being canceled back then, but also because of what they were leaving behind, what they were steering themselves into, and just what would have happened next for the characters. At least, had there been a season two of Freaks and Geeks.

The ideas that the creators toyed around with for Freaks and Geeks had it been given a second season would have been interesting, too. For instance, let’s say that Kim, during the concert, had experienced a life-changing event that would’ve affected her relationship with Daniel. That, and the idea of Lindsay’s family finding out where she’d been when it looked like she was heading out to the University of Michigan, would have guaranteed engaging storylines for the show. But as it was during Discos and Dragons, the characters were beginning to split apart by the end of the school year, and it only made the season-one-finale-turned-series-finale suddenly carry more of a moving-on angle to it. I can understand why so many people would have been upset that Freaks and Geeks didn’t get what they believed the show deserved, but given what it had going for it, it still closed out the series on as satisfactory a note as it possibly could have.

If I had one nitpick about this show, it’s the brother-and-sisterly relationship between Lindsay and Sam. Not that it’s bad; on the contrary, I wish this had been explored more throughout the series, because each one’s positions made me wonder what they would’ve thought about the other by then. How would Lindsay and Sam have gotten along after aligning themselves with different people, as high school society expected them to? Would they have looked at each other any differently back home, as they probably would have in school? Would they have still been close? Mainly, they were kept to side glances back home, but it still would have been interesting to explore.

One of the more notable of such instances that stood out to me occurred in the Halloween episode, ‘Tricks and Treats’. In this episode, Sam and his friends wanted to go trick-or-treating before they outgrew it. But after having the short end of the stick, they moped about what little they pulled off, only they did so at the wrong place at the wrong time. While Lindsay was enjoying her Halloween with her friends by bashing other people’s mailboxes and egging the houses in passing, Lindsay accidentally egged Sam, too. That stood out to me because it left em wondering, what would’ve happened if one person’s activities started to affect those of the other? Especially when such actions involved people who were technically brother and sister? That was one of the more memorable parts of the episode for me, if not the whole show, for the reasons I had stated.

However, given what the show pulled off, it still provided a very deft and intriguing look into the lives of high schoolers in and out of school, and into the interests and cliques that emerged as they went about their day-to-day lives together.

I know I’ve been comparing Freaks and Geeks to My So-Called Life a lot, but I generally can’t bring myself to do that with these shows. Doing that is like comparing Goodfellas to The Godfather. Each title is groundbreaking in its own right, but in both pairs, one title takes a more romantic approach to its subjects, while the other tells it like it is.

The writing was dead-on and creative. The characters were all enjoyably flawed. The acting was spot on. The casting was knocked out of the park. The authenticity of its era representations was everywhere. And its general representation of high school life offered a unique, bare-bones look at how high school went about its thing. Whatever you make of the characters and the high school experiences they went through in this show, bear in mind that this could be anyone’s high school life. And however much it resembles their own is entirely up to those who decide to check the show out and see what it has to say, besides it plunging some unknowns into superstardom.

Pop quiz: give this show a whirl and see what you can make out of its subjects.

My Rating

A high A

Works Cited

Lloyd, R. (2012, December 6). Paul Feig: What Would’ve Happened to Every Character in Freaks and Geeks’ Lost Second Season (Drugs! Pregnancies! Republicanism!). Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2012/12/paul-feig-season-two-freaks-and-geeks