Yahoo News Slackers, stars and soft denim montrosities: why Freaks and Geeks is still the ultimate high school show
Little by little, while the world’s attention has been diverted by the big-budget Maclunkeyisms of Disney+ or Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon on Apple TV+, All4 is quietly staking a claim as a streaming service of some repute. Last month it did the country an enormous favour by getting the rights to ER. It’s where you can see the entire second season of The End of the F***ing World, which broke the channel’s box-set records earlier this month. And, as of today, it has gone one better by securing every episode of one of television’s great lost shows: Freaks and Geeks.
Unlike something like Game of Thrones – which ended up a “cult show” because it stuck around for long enough and had bajillions thrown at it – Freaks and Geeks is true cult, where a show speaks intensely to a small but rabid group of fans determined to keep its spirit alive (see also The OA and pre-Netflix Arrested Development).
The show hasn’t been in production since the turn of the millennium, but believers have kept the flame alive for two reasons. The first is that, as a show about a clutch of high school outcasts, it spoke profoundly to scores of lonely teens. It quickly became a place where they could see their fears and insecurities reflected back at them, which is a neat trick to pull off. When a show can connect with an audience as intensely as that, the audience will never let go of it.
The second reason, though, is that NBC cancelled Freaks and Geeks after just 12 episodes of an 18-episode season, and there is nothing but proof that this was a colossal mistake.But once it went away, Freaks and Geeks managed to slather its fingerprints all over popular culture for the next two decades. Its creator? Paul Feig, of Bridesmaids fame (and latterly Last Christmas, but let’s forget about that). Its producer? Judd Apatow, of nearly all American comedy from the past decade. Its cast? Where to start! Freaks and Geeks had an ensemble unparalleled in its potential: Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Linda Cardellini, Busy Phillips, Martin Starr and James Franco. Almost everyone who appeared on the show went on to become a movie star. It’s hard not to try and imagine the looks on the faces of the NBC executives once they realised what had slipped through their fingers.
But Freaks and Geeks isn’t just a fun little Before They Were Famous yearbook. It’s also, arguably, the most finely observed comedy-drama about school ever made. The experience of feeling like an outsider at the most emotionally vulnerable time of your life is so universal that I defy anyone not to connect with it on some level. Even reading the line about Feig’s inspiration for the show – “I saw this group of tough girls walking on the other side of the street, smoking. There was one girl who was trying to look tough, but that’s not who she was” – manages to pierce your defences in a single stroke.
Everyone has a Freaks and Geeks character to whom they can connect. There’s Lindsay, based on the girl who Feig saw smoking. There’s Daniel, who uses studied apathy to cover his anxiety about his intelligence. There’s Sam, who in one episode turns up to school in a soft denim monstrosity called a Parisian Nightsuit, and whose humiliation is so total that I still find it quite hard to watch. Every character is trying, with varying degrees of success, to style out their own deep insecurities. It is deeply, deeply relatable.
Of course, we’re now living in the golden age of teen TV. To watch Freaks and Geeks for the first time in 2019 is to get a slightly diluted experience, now that the world is packed silly with shows about high school outsiders. But it’s important to note that none of them would exist without Freaks and Geeks; not Sex Education, not PEN15, not Big Mouth. The impact caused by Freaks and Geeks is enormous. If you haven’t seen it, watch all 18 episodes immediately. And if you have, then why not geek out all over again?
