#7: "We climbed aboard their starship..."

The nostalgia of high school isn't a particularly new thing--either as a pleasant remembrance of things past or a sad looking-back at growing pains.  High school stories in general have flooded the marketplace since the perhaps slightly overrated oeuvre of John Hughes up to recent entries like Mean Girls or Superbad or "Dawson's Creek".  But for capturing not only the pain and angst of high school, but the true feeling of being lost, like your equilibrium is out-of-whack because you can't locate yourself, "Freaks and Geeks" hits everything squarely on that thing holding up your glasses.


The Paul Feig-created, Judd Apatow-produced TV show came out a couple of years into my college experience, too early really to have any kind of thoughtful distance from high school.  I absolutely loved the show and watched it every week (at least when I could find it, as NBC seemed to frequently change its days and time slots), but it wasn't until after rewatching it a few years ago did it have a more resonant impact.

From the geeky guys (Sam, Neal, and Bill) who ached for even a minor acknowledgment from the popular girls, while simultaneously tried to avoid from being physically abused, to the girl (Sam's sister Lindsay) who was fed up with the rigid structure of her life and joined the freaks, the show fully understood the perspective of the perpetual outcast.  And not just from them.  Nearly every person, from the core ensemble to the more secondary characters are given this particular kernel of experience.  In some way, either briefly or as a full episode's storyline or even through the entire arc of the single season, everyone is acknowledged to be some kind of outsider--a trait which, in my particular opinion, might actually be the most universal of all.

One of the things you learn as you get a little older is that the dynamics of high school don't necessarily end once high school does.  It's weird to find your navigating through some of the same types of cliques you did more than 10 years ago.  People's lives change constantly even if their mentalities stay the same.  Watching Sam and Lindsay Weir trying to figure out their way through and their place in high school reminded me not of high school but of my life since it.  You don't realize it during high school, but, if you're lucky (and I was), you usually have a net.  When you're out on your own and still trying to figure it all out, you can only rely on yourself.

It was a cause of sadness to many when the show was cancelled.  But the one season and it's 18 episodes are as full and probably more self-contained than many other long-running series.  Its final moments are almost perfect and it's probably better that it ended there than fizzle out under the trappings of episodic storytelling.  I may even go as far as saying that if the only episode was the single pilot (as is the case with many failed shows), it would still be a significant television achievement.  Oh hell, let's narrow this down even further.  The final ten minutes of the pilot are transcendent.  It somehow manages to include all of the trite and clichéd devices of the high school movie/TV show and imbue them with a wit, authenticity, and sloppiness sorely lacking in most other examples of the genre. In particular, Sam's interaction with Cindy the cheerleader seems so painfully awkward that it admittedly brought back so many memories of the million-and-one conversations I've had with a million-and-one Cindy Sanders--from high school to, well, now.

This summer, IFC will be showing the series every Friday at 11, and rerunning that episode some time during that weekend.  If you've never seen it, this will be a good opportunity to find out what you've missed.  If you have, it's a good opportunity to catch up with some old friends.



(Update: above video won't play embedded, but if you click the link, it will pop up on the actual YouTube site. It's worth it.)