Optic Nerve: Freaks and Geeks R.I.P. page 2

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Freaks and Geeks: R.I.P.

I could write for pages on why I love this show. How it perfectly illustrated the difficulties of "fitting in" in High School, no matter who or what you are. How it showed that wonderful period of time in the very early 80s when some kids were still stuck in the 70s, but some were hip to things changing. It is very accurate in its portrayal of the time period too: the wardrobe is great, and the soundtrack is like another character in the show. Everything is there: the dorky clothing, the bad TV shows, the crap music. However, I couldn't say it any better than Robert Lloyd (a writer for the LA Weekly) in a column called God, the Devil and NBC:

A moment of silence, of sadness, of fist shaking over NBC's cancellation of Freaks and Geeks, as much a candidate as any for the best program on television, and the victim, as so many shows before it, of the numbers-hungry priorities of a big electric billboard that occasionally disguises itself as an art form. Paul Feig and Judd Apatow's series about life on the high school fringe at the turn of the'80s Ñ which in its last, briefly occupied time slot was put against the similarly premised, less complex, more traditionally sitcomedic That'70s Show Ñ was human-comedy, quietly ambitious and staunchly unwilling to make either a joke, a villain or a cause out of any of its imperfect, unwise characters. I suppose that was their big mistake.

The characters on most television shows are less like people you know than they are like characters on other television shows; they're cogs in well-greased story machines, graspable embodied "concepts" to whom you are required to have a single, uncomplicated, unvarying and ultimately positive reaction (this goes for bad guys, too) for as long as the show lasts; networks test for these things, the way other marketers test customer reaction to breakfast cereals and auto bodies. Even as intelligent a series as Frasier is essentially static and predictable Ñ indeed, the humor is largely predicated on your knowing in advance how a character will react Ñ and though the actors have ripened in their roles over time, you could skip a year or two and not feel as though you'd missed anything. As written by Feig, Apatow, Bob Nickman, Gabe Sachs, Jeff Judah, Jon Kasdan, Josh Weinstein, Mike White, Patty Lin, Steve Bannos and Rebecca Kirshner, Freaks and Geeks was a show about becoming, and its characters, because they were not fixed, were capable of surprising and even disappointing you. You laughed, you cried. It was at the same time singularly honest, without being judgmental, as regards differences in class and consciousness, the basic unfairness of life and the range of human limitation Ñ a fairly radical tack in a time when we're all supposed to be capable of being, having or accomplishing anything we want.

The whole point of Freaks and Geeks, which came onto television in the season of Popular, Roswell, and the continuing rosy, youthful glow of Dawson's Creek and Felicity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was to repudiate that sort of glossy wish fulfillment and represent the real: a show about kids who looked like and acted like kids, rather than impossibly well-spoken runway models. "I feel like most high school shows are written by guys who go, 'If I knew then what I know now, I would rule,'" says Feig. "Which is bullshit. You'd just get your ass kicked worse. You'd be one-upping the bully with a clever quip, and -- bam!" Jake Kasdan, who directed the pilot and four other episodes, and helped establish the look and feel of the show, developed an aesthetic of "uncosmetic decisions." "The close-ups are looser than you'd expect -- there's a little too much space, and the kids are kind of awkward in the frame -- and we used a very cool palette as opposed to most network dramas, which are very warm, and everyone's incredibly pretty and healthy-looking, so that everyone's cheeks are this vibrant red. Where on Freaks and Geeks everyone's face is sort of like . . . light blue." The producers encouraged improvisation and input from their young players, who were cast, says Paul, "with no criteria other than that we want the most talented, funny, good kids in the world. You see a lot of precocious kids who have been coached by their parents and have all these strange adult mannerisms, but when the kid walks in who is confident enough to just be himself or herself, you immediately go, That's the kid." Some had never acted professionally before, some had never acted at all. In many cases, the creators worked backward, inventing characters to suit the actors they found; by the time the cameras rolled, the pilot had been two-thirds rewritten.

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by neil

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