The Prestige TV Podcast - Did ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Stick the Landing?

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Andy Greenwald is joined by Joanna Robinson to discuss “Discos and Dragons,” the series finale of ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ They open by talking about the show’s cultlike following, all of its famous alumni, and how NBC didn’t understand how to treat it (3:10). Next, they break down the reasons for its premature ending and why its short life span contributed to its prolonged impact (56:36). Later, they share their feelings on a potential ‘Freaks and Geeks’ reunion down the line (74:08). Finally, they answer the titular question: “Did it stick the landing?” (71:25). Host: Andy Greenwald Guest: Joanna Robinson Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Theme Song and Other Music Credits: Giancarlo Vulcano Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a show that launched 100 careers but only lasted 18 episodes. Is it just me or does the whole world suck? This is Stick the Landing, freaks and geeks. Okay, this is Andy Greenwald welcoming you to another edition of Stick the Landing, a new podcast about endings. I am very excited to be joined on this episode by my colleague on the Ringer Podcast Network. Joanna Robinson, thank you for doing this with me. Oh my gosh, thank you for asking me.

I'm so thrilled to put the army jacket on, hop in the back of the van, and do this with you. And drive away into an unknown future. Yes. That will never, ever, ever, ever be resolved. We are talking about freaks and geeks, which ran on NBC for just one short season from 1999 until 2000. The final episode, Discos and Dragons aired on, well, that's the whole thing. When did it air and when did they film it? We'll talk about this.

Written directed by the series creator Paul Feig. this is a show that is as fiercely beloved as maybe anything in recent history and probably ran for a lot fewer episodes than any of those other favorites. Yeah, I mean, I think it's such an incredible artifact of television at this precise moment, but also so many people who make television cite this as one of their favorite TV shows. And I think it's so valuable to consider why that is and also to consider, I mean, you. you brought this up, I don't want to steal your bit, but consider if we would love it as much if it had run longer. Or one of the reasons we love it is it feels so precious and short and contained, you know? Yeah, this is, obviously this is only, we haven't recorded that many episodes of the series, but this is, at least in terms of our own chronology, like this is the first show that we've covered that didn't get to call it shot.

It did to a slight degree, but this is a show with a sort of an unexpected finale that it steered into. I also think the point you're making is crucial here, which is that like freaks and geeks is like the Velvet Underground of TV creators, right? Like it is absolutely beloved. It was past, I mean, for years it wasn't really available on streaming. So it had a, it was cult like when it was on and then it became even more cult like as it was passed around and talked about and its legend grew. Do people love it for how good it was? I mean, spoiler alert, yes, they do. But also how much of that love comes to the fact that it was cruelly and unjustly,

cut down and we were robbed of more episodes. And if only we'd known what happened when Lindsay's parents found out what happened, that she went off to follow the dead. What's the ratio of that? Exactly. And also, would this show be as Beloved or such a curiosity of its time, if the almost entire, I would say entire cast hadn't gone on to become megastars, if Judd and Paul hadn't gone on to do so much, Mike White is on the show. There's so many luminaries that come out of this show. And so then it feels, I mean, if you're Paul Fagan and you're Judd Apatow,

there must be nothing that feels more vindicating than everyone on the show becoming a megastar and getting to think back to NBC kids in the show and saying, we were right, and you were so wrong to take the show off the air. It's unbelievable. And Judd Apatow has talked in interviews saying that everything he's done in his career

post the year 2000 was out of spite because of what happened to the show and why he cast things the way he cast, who he celebrated, who he championed, how he worked. It's all reactive to what happened with freaks and geeks on NBC at the end of the last century. And I think that's, I didn't have that exact quote from Jeb, but I had in my notes this question of what does failure at this point in their careers do for Paul Feig and Judd Apatow? Because I think that's something that we don't celebrate enough is the moments of failure

and what that can do for a creative mind and how that can be a critical, whether it's spite or something else, how it can spark so many other things that we then value. Before we even talk about, I am curious about how you discovered the show, what your relationship to it was before we get into specifically to Discos and Dragons, the 18th and final episode of Freaks and Geeks. I just wrote down some of the names of people whose career started on this show. And I think it's important for people. I think people kind of get it, and we've already made reference to a few of them.

But like, let's really name names here. Okay, Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, Seth Rogan, James Franco, Jason Siegel, Linda Cardalini, Busy Phillips. Martin Starr, John Francis Daly, who is no longer acting, but is writing and directing and wrote the first Tom Hardy Spider-Man movie, and he made the vacation movie. And Game Night, one of my favorite comedies of all time. Lizzie Kaplan, Ben Foster, David Krumholtz, Rashida Jones.

We're in the guest stars now, but I think it still counts. Shia LeBuff, Jason Schwartzman. And as you mentioned, Mike White was on the writing staff, having worked for one year on Dawson's Creek and was just like, I cannot with this phoniness. I'm never working in TV again. And then it was shown a videotape of the pilot and said, I can with that. That's what I've been trying to do my whole career thus far.

Yeah. It's insane. Certainly for the number of episodes they made, there is no show with a comparable list of successful alumni. I don't think so. And I think to your point, we may never know in terms of certainly Franco, Segal, and Rogan, how much their continued success has to do with Jed Aptow, putting them in everything, he wanted to prove a point, but they're so talented. I think they would have just gone anyway.

And I think also, you know, there's, I don't want to jump too far into this whole idea of it's good that it ended. But for their careers, it's good that it ended here, right? Because oftentimes when people pop on a TV show, they then become associated with that character if it goes on and on and on, right? Like, James Vanderbik is Forever Dawson, you know, and Pacey and Joey, that's who those actors are to a lot of people. Whereas, you know, Daniel Lissario and Sam Weir and all these characters are iconic to me. Those actors weren't locked into that. So this becomes this incredible showcase for them. Busy Phillips goes and does Dawson's Creek. Like, it becomes this incredible showcase for young talent without putting them in those, you know, confinement of being a character.

It's not often talked about. And it's certainly when actors luck into successful TV shows, nobody wants to hear about them complaining about the golden handcuffs they're stuck in. Right, right. But it is worth pursuing the real what-ifs here where, just to pull an example out of the top of my head, ABC had a Noah Hawley's first show was called The Unusuals. And there was an hour-long drama 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago now. And in its cast was Jeremy Renner. Yeah. And Jeremy Renner is locked into that show for seven years, playing an unpredictable cop.

The show gets canceled, and he goes and does the hurt lockers. His career is totally different. And I could not agree with you more. We were going to keep circling this idea of as painful as it was at the time, kind of this is a good thing. When we think about that long list of people, all of whom were free to be captured at this beautiful, sparking moment of their creativity and career, and then pour it into 100 other vessels and not be typecast forever as who they were on this show.

And I think it's so interesting you think about freaks and geeks in this moment. I love what you said about Mike White and the funniness of Dawson's because I was such a consumer of teen television. at this time of my life. Yeah, please paint us a picture. I think the personal anecdotes are important here for why we're doing this. 1999, I was senior in high school. And so right down the middle target audience

of the WB Teen Explosion, which is, this is the golden era, right? There's Buffy and Felicity and Dawson Creek and Roswell and all of that. But it is such, if you look at the TV landscape of that time, that's the mark. that's the market that WB was was cornering. Maybe NBC decides they want to dip their toe in this,

but this doesn't align with anything else that NBC is doing at the time. This is the musty TV friends and suddenly Susan and Third Rock from the Sun and all of that is, you know, Frazier's there, this, that, and the other thing, Will and Grace, et cetera. So they, and it was such a different time for our understanding of what makes a comedy and what makes the drama. So Freaks and Geeks is the ultimate outsider because it doesn't feel. fit. It's way ahead of its time. It doesn't fit with what teen television is at the time.

It doesn't fit with the comedies of NBC or West Wing the dramas of NBC. And so nobody, except for the person who green lit it in the first place, knows what to do with it. The answer is just let it be what it is, but that was too uncomfortable, I think, for it. It's something we don't really talk about now in an era when with so much bespoke niche programming and there's a show for everyone and people understand whether it's from analytics or from marketing data, like who watches what and how we can get it to them, that the miracle of the show is that it happened at all. That it somehow slipped through, that people believed in it enough to let it have 18 episodes. I remember, so when this show came out, I had just, I'm, I guess I'm about four years older than

you, so I just started working at Spin Magazine. This is a relatable story, Kai, I promise. I was working in media in New York. But this was my first encounter. Like, I didn't understand how anything worked in the media. And I met this music magazine, and I remember walking past the kitchen where there was a TV with a VCR, and some of the editors, younger editors, were in there because they got sent the VHS tapes of the new pilots for the fall season. Wow. And they were watching them almost like out of mockery, because nobody wanted to watch NBC pilots. Like, what's it going to be? You know, Law and Order 8 or whatever. Plu Sashange, everything's, you know. But so it's like the younger assistants were watching,

going through the tapes and making fun of them. And then they watched. freaks and geeks and then I was like what are you guys watching and it it resonated so instantly like it was like a like a a a whistle that only certain people could hear something special is here something magical is here didn't recognize any of these people certainly could not predict what was coming for them Judd Apatow had already had the beginnings of a career and was a name but not one that you know a 22 year old knew it clearly mattered and everyone was like well this is doomed like immediately immediately immediately

communicated that this was special and that this was doomed, which was a very, very common way to feel about art that you loved in the 90s. I love that. And I think the closest comp, I think to answer your much earlier question of when did I watch this or how do I remember watching this, they would run it. I want to say it was on like a Fox family channel. I don't know. I had a friend who had all the channels. I didn't grow up with all the channels, but my friend had all the channels. And I have such a strong memory of being at her house and they were doing. a marathon of freaks and geeks on like Fox Family or something like that. And so we sat down and we started watching it. And we loved it so much that we blew off whatever plans we had with people and we just like stayed and watched the freaks and geeks episodes. And I think that's where a few of the episodes that they never aired, that never found their way to NBC initially aired. But so I didn't catch it in its first run, but this was like right around. I think it had already been canceled, but it was right around. It was like the fall after is when we caught it on this

marathon. And then to your point about it's not streaming, it wasn't on digital media for a while, it just sort of, it becomes this sort of urban legend of this great show that only a few people have seen. And the closest comp I have is my so-called life, which was similarly, I think, way ahead of its time in terms of what it did, influential in terms of how people wrote teenagers, too real, too good, too wonderful for. the network at the time in the 90s and then canceled and then had this long, long tail of appreciation. I think it's really, in some ways it's just shocking, even to those of us who have lived through it, to consider what the priorities of these broadcast engines were at

the time and how different they are to what entertainment conglomerates priorities are now. Because now, if you make something, whether it's objectively good in an aesthetic or critical sense, or it's just you made it. There are departments devoted to getting it to people. I'm not saying everything gets marketed the same. I'm not saying some things don't get kind of just disappeared or dumped or whatever, but like bare minimum, you like you will make the episodes available in a consistent way, maybe even all at once, for a service that people pay for or can understand how to acquire. Freaks and Geeks was picked up off of this beautiful pilot and ordered to series, and it was immediately scheduled for Saturday nights on NBC.

I think within four or five years of the show debuting, the networks gave up on Saturday nights. They just stopped programming original content on Saturday nights. But they put it on Saturday nights. So this is a show that is going to appeal to people between the ages of 15 and 30, and they're putting it on a night when, theoretically, maybe not freaks or geeks,

but everyone else who will find the show are not going to watch it. They put it up against the 10th season of cops, and the 10th season of cops destroyed it in the ratings. Like absolutely wiped it. the floor with it. But then there was also playoff baseball and all these other, you know, the disruptions of the broadcast calendar. And so we had a show that premiered on September 25th, 1999 to nine million viewers, which would make it the number one show of 20, of 22, by a large

margin. The second episode aired one week later on October 2nd. It lost a considerable amount of its audience that shows tend to do, down to 5.5.5. another episode did not air for four weeks until the Halloween episode. So you got three episodes in a period of six weeks. And then the next episode, episode four, the absolutely iconic episode, Kim Kelly is my friend that deserves its own podcast episode, that explores female friendship and bullying and added in home life and all these domestic issues in a really fresh way then and still works today. That episode wasn't aired at all on NBC. They just didn't air it. They just skip to the next one on November 6th.

It never made sense. And the point you were making, Joe, about Fox Family, is that there were episodes of the show filmed that never aired on NBC. Apatown Feig were allowed to premiere them at the Academy Museum in L.A. in the summer of 2000. And then Fox Family acquired the rerun rights

and essentially debuted, I don't know if it was, I have the information here. I don't know if it was three or five episodes later. that fall. Yeah, yeah. And that's fascinating. I mean... Five, five episodes

didn't even air on NBC. It's not... The finale did, which is... I'm glad that, like, they got the finale on NBC. The finale did. But... So it's not like they pulled, like, the last five. They were just, like, plucking sporadically

from the order. They were... And they were shuffling things in order. And this was the experience of watching Firefly. People recall that experience, too. It was just this, like, chaotic, almost malicious-seeming

scheduling of a show. And Apatow and Figue have talked about the fact that when this, when the show was picked up, there was not a head of programming at NBC. Yes, it kind of slipped through. And then Garth Ancier comes from Warner Brothers to NBC, and he does not like the show. The line that Apatow uses in several interviews was,

this guy went to private school so he doesn't understand public school, so he just doesn't get the show. And so then it, it does feel almost like it's like dumping five episodes of Echo on Hulu Plus the first week of January, which is what Disney is doing with one of their shows right now.

It's like how to bury a show. This is just a different way that they used to do that. Or it's like, let's burn it off. Yeah. And we and well, I think let's get into the specifics of the episode itself because at the end,

I do want to talk more about the decision making that got us here. Because what's interesting now in retrospect and the cast and crew have done a number of retrospectives. There was a huge oral history of the show that Vanity Fair did 10 years ago that really holds up and it's fascinating. Every time the show has sort of popped back up again when they finally cleared the music rights and it went on Hulu where it is to this day, people talked about it again. And what's interesting is that there is a lack of rancor.

Like there is a sense that people wanted the show to succeed. It wasn't like the network was trying to kill it, which I have heard. There are many examples of that happening. It's just that they fundamentally didn't understand it. And they also didn't understand why, in their view, Abatown Figue, referex. to give the show a chance to succeed, which meant giving characters more, quote, unquote, wins. Why wouldn't they just give them one or two more wins?

And this is another reason why I think we're gonna end up in the same place, which is to say that's like, better to burn out than fade away, better to be the show you always were than start making mistakes, or start hedging or start accommodating. You and I are recording this in a moment when frequent guests of my other podcast watch Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage are doing a anniversary tour about the OC, another team show.

I was just going to mention the OC, yeah. And they're now, you know, however many years later, being like, we never should have killed Marissa. Like, we were responding to market forces and fan sentiment, and we were listening to voices that weren't our own, and we were just bending with the wind. And these guys never did that. Yeah. Similarly, you brought up Twin Peaks before we started recording, David Lynch says that all the time about, like, revealing who killed Laura Palmer. He did not want to do it as quickly as he was asked to do it by the network. And then they did it. And then sort of the juice of the show, uh, seeps out of it. But I think the OC is also a really interesting case study because Abtow and Figue have said that because they were so certain

they were going to get canceled and we'll talk about how that relates to the finale, then they were like, well, let's not save anything for season two or three or four. Let's just burn through our top-tier content and make every episode an absolute gemstone. Schwartz and Savage did that on the OC as well. Burned through story they talk about all the time, you know. But then they had to then make several more seasons of the show, and that's why the first season of the OCE feels so vital and vibrant. And then they were like, oh, no, we have no more ideas.

We burned it. They burned it so quickly in season one over the O.C. When we talk about this idea of winds, there's a great example that Judd Apatow gives in, I'm pulling from the Vanity Fair oral history where he's talking about Garth Ancier, who, and this is beautifully ironic and very Hollywood, that freaks and geeks gets onto NBC in the absence of someone like steering the ship, basically. And it's, as Mike White saw when he watched the videotape of the pilot, this is not Dawson's Creek. Let me add it. NBC poaches the head of the WB, Garth Ancier, who has greenlit Dawson's Creek to come take over their network. So he is now in charge of freaks and geeks. And this is a Judd Apatow quote. Garth took me out to lunch once and asked for more victories.

And so we did an episode where Bill plays softball. We have this triumphant moment where he catches the ball, but he doesn't realize everyone's tagging up. He's celebrating catching the ball, but he's actually losing the game by not throwing it to home plate. That's as far as we could get. So can I ask you a quick question? Do you have a moment from freaks and geeks that you identify as your favorite

that sticks out to you as like, the most, the favorite. It's hard because I think for me, and I didn't rewatch the whole thing for this podcast, so it's less one particular moment and then more a constant vibe. I think

there's two things that come to mind in response to your question. One, we're going to get to when we talk about the finale, so I'll save it. The other one, and this has talked about a lot in the Vanity Fair article too, which is when Jason Segal's character gets the chance to to audition as a drummer.

Yeah. And he's not good enough. Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's something that is so purely this show. And honestly, not just unique to the show, but kind of unique in American narrative entertainment, where someone's not good enough.

Or that your dream is not going to come true, that also on a less bleak note that your life and your sense of yourself are not complete at 15 or 16 or however old these kids are. Yes. And they're unwavering commitment to that. idea even while championing these flawed, unformed heroes. Like that stays with me. I love those moments.

And the fact that that's a loss for Nick, for Jason Segal's character, it's one of my favorite TV moments, full stop, probably because I was also a Lashkekeke kid, is when Bill, played by Martin Star, makes a grilled cheese sandwich, pours a glass of milk and sits down and watches a stand-up routine from Gary Shanling and just laughs and it's silent because we've got a, you know, a needle drop over it. I'm the one by the Who, which has the lyrics, I'm a loser, no chance to win, right? And it's just him. And the story that they tell is that, you know, Apatow, et cetera, we're behind the camera just telling absolutely filthy jokes to Martin Star to make him like genuinely crack up. And it's just like, it captures the

experience of, you know, Bill, who's my favorite character? Bill just, like, being this absolutely iconic nerd loser. But here's this sort of isolated, warm, fuzzy moment where he can just, like, experience joy through the TV that he watches. And I just love that moment so much. It is such a perfect portrait of a loser, but the joy you find in your loserdom and the other joy you find in your loserdom is the connection with your friends. And this is part of why Freaks and Geeks is not only important to people, but important to the generation, the Judd Apatow, JJ Abrams, et cetera, generation that go on to make our iconic, our Star Wars, et cetera.

That particular niche of geekdom of like, let's talk about Star Wars, let's in the finale get really excited because we've got Monty Python like on a film reel that we can watch. Those are the people who grew up and started making our content for us in the 90s to now. And so that mirror of themselves, you know? It's a beautiful observation. I agree totally as someone who, I mean, I won't name names, but I definitely, I know of people myself who would stay up late watching PBS fundraisers to watch episodes of Monty Python because it's the only way that you could watch them. It's also such a beautiful and important moment because this show, fundamentally understood being young in a way that a lot of other glossy young shows didn't,

which is that being young is an act of constantly building different versions of yourself like sandcastles out of the accrued cultural minutia that you gain access to. Right. And they're impermanent, but they're so vital and important while you have them. You don't at that age really define yourself by who you like and who likes you. It's what you like and how that makes you feel. I think the secondary response to your observation, which is such a good one, but it is slightly depressing, is that that generation who grew up that way then went on to

become rich and successful just making their same childhood shit again and making Star Wars and not making something new. But we'll always have this to look back to you and feel connected to. Some of them had things to say about the things they loved as kids. And some of them just, and they'll say it in interviews, they'll say, I talk about this all the time, the filmmakers and TV creators that we, like love a lot of their content, they'll talk about, sorry, I know content is not your favorite word, but like, we'll talk about growing up with their counteraction figures, Star Wars counteraction

figures, and smashing them together in the backyard. And then they go, oh my God, how cool I get to do this now for a living. And that has a very small window of juice or artistic merit, and then you're sort of running on nostalgia vapor. But I think that this idea of like pop culture eating its own tail kind of originates here. But I love your other point about this idea of trying on, who am I, trying on different personalities. It's claridates of my so-called life dyeing her hair, bright red, and trying on who that person is.

And it's Lindsay we were putting on this army jacket. And it's like these literal physical trappings of, but that idea of culture so perfectly pertains to the finale because in Nick and Lindsay and Kim trying on music as is this is this me am i disco is this me am i a deadhead is a brilliant a brilliant way to go out for this show i think lindsay becoming a complete deadhead to the point of throwing away her not her life but her certainly her summer and her short-term goodwill with her parents off of a record she gets she got for one day yeah is so true to being a teenager it's beautifully observed and this idea of trying things on and the impermanence of this age is so perfectly captured in this finale

episode and I think it's part of what makes it a good finale full stop. We should get into some of the specifics of Discos and Dragons. I do want to say you mentioned, I referred to Jason Seagull's character. You said Nick, which reminded me of just one other thing that I'd forgotten about this show, which is that it is also deserves a place on the come on here, everybody's really Jewish Hall of Fame along with George Costanza. We're like, everyone's kind of Greek, right? Or like, or Seth Rogan is playing someone whose last name is Miller. Like, okay, sure. Sure. Sure. That used to be Millerovich, for sure. But that used to be something people do. We had to sort of hide the ball a little bit. He's just, he's ethnic. I was thinking about

friends. The Gellers and the Greens are Jewish, but they never talk about Hanukkah or celebrate at all. A million percent. I can't believe they even got away with those names. Yeah, but it's just, but it's just like astounding. They celebrate Christmas enthusiastically every year on that show. It's really funny. But David Schwimmer's not fooling anybody. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terseptitide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription

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We keep moving the ball backwards, but it's important to say. This was the 18th episode. It was the finale. It was not the last episode filmed. The reason for that was during this first season of getting jerked around on the schedule, off the schedule, Apatau and Feig, this is their story that they've told in public. They happened to both be in Vegas at the same time.

And they were like, I don't know, man. I don't know what they're going to do to us. don't know how it's looking. And Apatau said, you should probably write an ending. You should probably be prepared. So I said at the beginning, this was an unintentional finale. There was intention in the sense that Paul Fieg wrote an episode that he thought might be the end. They filmed it, and then they got an order for a few more episodes. So then this became the 18th when I think originally it was the 15th or something. This was during an era of broadcast where you would get the pilot, then you'd get picked up for eight or nine more, then you would get what was called the

back nine. It was a constant negotiation during that first season. This episode was written by Paul Fieg, and then he filmed it, and then they had to go back and back film more episodes, even though they kind of knew they were done. And this is Paul Figue's directorial debut. This is the first thing he ever directed is the Freezing Big finale, and I think that's beautiful. Yeah, and he's talked about how he got a directing career off of this that then, in his words, died in 2007, and then Judd Apatow resurrected him by giving him the chance to direct bridesmaids in 2011. So the These two guys were bound together. Discos and Dragons begins.

I thought this was a nice bit of symmetry. I love when you can see this. The premiere of the show, which is boringly named Pilot, ends at a dance. It ends at the homecoming dance with everyone having their own experience to come sail away. This episode begins in a disco. So we get a little symmetry of dancing

and we get the gang of freaks coming to this, I think it's like a bowling alley that also has a small disco setup. It's the smallest dance floor I've ever seen in my life. And they show up just to yell disco sucks. Yeah. And they catch, shocking everyone, they catch Nick Endopoulos on the dance floor,

basically in a full leisure suit. Do you think they knew Jason Segal? Like, making Jason Segal dance is just gold. Like, he's now had 20 years of it. Yeah. Because he's enormously tall, and it's very silly to see. And as Seth Rogen says,

like you're too tall to dance anyway. Do you think this is the moment that they all discovered it, or do you think they knew? I think they had a really remarkable sense of what to do with, because I think similarly Martin Starr, like when they dress Bill up as a bionic woman for the Halloween episode, like I think they knew what to do with these sort of like tall, gangly bodies.

They were just sort of like, this will be funny. This is inherently funny. It's so funny to see, like, the things that Apatow and Feig did, and I feel like it would be impossible today, But the things that they did to try and keep this special cast of weirdos looking like a special cast of weirdos, like when Franco, I guess, started to like get method.

And I was reading about this, apparently, like when he got the part, he then disappeared for a week because he moved to Michigan to study Paul Feig's high school to observe people who were there because this is who he was. But like midway through the season,

he started getting like broody and like, you know, methidi and they were like, and they showed him his audition tape. And he was like, I was terrible. And they were like, we want that. That's what we hired. But that Figue and Apatow also, and this is Linda Cardalini and busy Phillips joking about it, would pull them aside every so often and be like, it's so great that you're not like other actresses or you don't feel pressure, you know,

because a lot of people get pressure and they have their picture taken and they should look a certain way. And she's like, they were telling us not to get skinny. Like they wanted them always to look like they were in high school in 1980 in Michigan. It's great thing how real you look. That's so funny. Yeah, the language of that. It's kind of cringy. imagine these men doing this at any time, let alone 23 years ago. Oh my gosh. But also we get

Lizzie Kaplan, who must have been like 17 herself as Sarah, as Jason Segal's new girlfriend, who is his disco dancing queen. From here we go to the AV club, which was, again, like, spurned through so much that like to go from the pilot to the finale, 18 episodes, this world of a secret place for the geeks where they feel safe, it was such a smart transition and it emerged very naturally over the course of the season. We get Steve Higgins, who's now, I guess, mostly famous for being the dad of one of the police don't destroy guys. No, I refuse.

Come on. I know. I'm pandering here. I'm pandering to, like, younger than Kayas generation. Okay. He's great in this. He's so good. He's great.

And he gives, what I think is an iconic speech, right? About, like, here's where you are in your arc of your life versus where those guys are. Yeah. Cameron Crowe was watching this. He's like, I'm going to put it in almost famous. Yeah. Around the same. same time, but it's basically the same idea. Nice call back to Monty Python on the Holy Grail,

which is I think mentioned in the pilot as well. It's so crazy that this, so watching this show when it was on, or you were watching it just relatively a few months after it had been on, I mean, I both hate and love doing things like this, but it was talking about a time that was, what, like 18 to 20 years in the rear view. Yeah. So the version, the contemporary version of Freaks and Geeks would be set in 03, 0.04. That's, horrifying and I prefer you not do that. But what it does reveal, so this

is said in 80-81, which is when I was born, and they're, you know, teens, young teens, pre-teens at the time. But my friends and I, when we were teens, were also talking about the same Star Wars films and the same Monty Python jokes.

And that's just because the turnover on what was sort of classic nerd culture was so much slower. Yes. You know, previously, we didn't have new Star Wars until my senior year of high school. And so it's just funny because it is so much of a time. They capture a very specific time.

But there is something, you know, and especially as you get into the Dragons part of this finale, there are some timeless elements of geekery that they captured as well. I think the other thing is that there's aspects of this show that were relatable in 1999, 2000. They were relatable in 8081. They were relatable in 60, 61, not 1661, but 1960, 1961. And those things were, there's a scarcity of content. I'm using the word now. And a complete lack of things to do.

Yeah. And you're not on your phone. Yeah, there's so much time. Yep. And you can be bored or you walk around or you just try to generate something to think about or do. And in that time, it creates too. things. One, genuine joy and excitement when you have a reel-to-reel of Monty Python on the Holy Grail for a

week. And two, you can listen to a record so intensely over the course of one afternoon that you change your entire identity in life. And so I do wonder, we are the wrong audience for this. But the things that suffuse this episode and the series with so much warmth and bittersweet, melancholy, like, are they just, like, completely foreign to a younger generation? I think it's interesting because for a time I was, you know, in my crusty, elder millennial, youthful Gen X, borderline sort of way, was really lamenting the fact because I'm not, I didn't grow up full-blown geek in that I've never played Dungeons and Dragons in my life, though you might be surprised to hear that from me, but...

Hold my fago. I'll talk to, I'll speak on that. But my friends and I definitely communicated in movie quotes. That's like what that was our language. And I was like, oh no, people don't do that anymore because they don't rewatch movies that way. There's so much content that you're not sitting and sort of marinating in the films that you love. You're just like there's something new to binge on Netflix every weekend. That's what I'm going to do. Then I realize that they speak in the youth are speaking in like meme languages or TikTok audios or something like.

There is a thing that exists that is similar to. the way that my friends and I talk to each other in movie quotes, that when we become crusty and older, we have to, like, constantly tell ourselves that's as valuable. It doesn't feel as valuable, but, like, what we did didn't feel as valuable to our parents about the way that they communicate with each other. So, like, you know. That's true. I think that's a warmer and more humanist way of looking at it. I just had this experience where my daughters really wanted to show me something, which I'm sure will never change. I'm sure that whenever they find something that they like, they'll always run to me to share it with me. That's just a, that's just a constant that I can

bank on. But what they wanted to show me was a YouTube video that it was called Enkonto, but awkward. And it was like scenes from the Disney movie Enkanto, which we all enjoyed as a family, but like slowed down or sped up or interspersed with like K-pop memes that I don't think they know. And I was just sort of tolerating it for a few minutes being like, okay, I get that you like this. and then I checked and there was 11 more minutes. And I was like, you know, it's okay that this is just for you. Yeah. But maybe your point is that this is their American beauty.

This is just them just building an identity, brick by brick. Lighting a candle and just watching K-pop memes, for sure. I think one of the things that is so interesting to look at this episode in hindsight and not to look at it through the prism of week-to-week TV brain, is the idea that characters are actively engaging with, quote-unquote, their future. They're actively engaging with what could come next, both next episode or next season, but also next phase of their lives if we're considering them as non-fictional people.

Okay, so I was re-watching the episode, and I'm like, wait, there's only 11 minutes left? Like, where's the, what are we saying here, you know? Because we're dealing with these three major pivot points in the episode. We see Lindsay wrestling with getting into this academic summer program that she's less than enthused about. But all the adult figures in her life, including Mr. Rousseau, are like, this matters. This is the most important thing that's going to happen to you. There's that great throwaway gag where she sees the administrator who's like, that changed my life and you'll end up like me. Yeah, and then he knocks over a cafeteria tray.

Yeah. as long as we have Nick being like, is this relationship and is this dancing making him happy or is he just being reactive? Is he once again enthralled to someone else's life like he's been to his father or he was to Lindsay or Daniel or is he actively making choices? And then the one that I found in some ways

one of the most moving is Daniels very, very sudden, again, this would have been a half-season arc in a streaming show. Yeah. His one-third of an episode, fall from, you know, king shit of the smokers yard to the fuck up in the AV club

playing D&D with the geeks. Somewhere in there, I was starting with this question of like, the way that it casually bumps up against these questions of what's next and what does it mean, at the time, I think I struggled with, I was like, oh, they're rushing through this. Now I think this is just beautiful and true

to lived experience as a teenager. Like, you just, Everything feels important and everything's happening very fast. It is wild to me when I forgot, in re-watching the finale, I forgot that Daniel's foray into the geek's side of the storyline isn't a longer arc. I was like, I can't believe that this is just happening right now. I will say, that D&D game, Franco's whole Carlos the dwarf thing, that's my second favorite thing that ever. happens on Freaks and Geeks. It's like Bill watching Gary Shanley and then Carlos the Dwarf on a D&D game. And I love what you have to say about this idea of the future.

Something I think that's interesting, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about like, again, whether or not this show, what a second season would have looked like or whether or not we would have wanted it. But something that Paul Feak said is that eventually he wanted to widen the lens from the high school to sort of this portrait of a town and what does it mean? what does it mean to leave and what does it mean to feel like you can't leave? He wanted to do The Wire, basically. I like that. Or Friday Night Lights, when you're still following the kids once they leave Dylan or something like that. But like when I love Paul Feeg's version of The Wire, it's a great thing to think about.

But given that that's on his mind, the fact that you have Kim Kelly say, like, at least you get to get out of this town for a little while to Lindsay. Like, why aren't you grateful for this opportunity you have, even if it's this intensely nerdy thing? you get to go. And it makes me so happy. I mean, it's so weird that Busy Phillips is not in the opening credits of the show or a main character in the show

because Kim is so, you know, from the very beginning, so important to the show. Essential. But the fact that they leave together is such a beautiful moment that Lindsay not only grabbed this, but grabbed, like,

Kim's hand on her way out of town. It's like, let's go. We're going to go. The show is made by people who, by all, like, societal accounts, succeeded, right? I mean, I don't want to speak.

I cannot speak to the day-to-day psychological experience of being Paul Figue, although he has a lovely suit collection. But outwardly, like, he was more or less the Sam character. But he made it. He made a life for himself that made sense with the things that he loved and figured himself out and seems to be happily married and making art and all these things. But the show has a very, very generous opinion of young people and particularly sensitive to the idea that at a time when,

the older people in your life are telling you there are two tracks. One towards, like the Joe Flaherty dad character constantly says, one that ends in death, no matter what, whether it's smoking or Janice Joplin or whatever. Right. Or one that ends in success. And success, I guess, would be running an outdoor supply store or whatever in the same town you grew up in.

That one of the benefits of being young is you can try stuff. And things are fungible. And even though it seems like they'll always be like that, that is not true. And so the risk reward of taking advantage of that is so beautifully expressed in this episode, let alone in the series. And I love that you mention the Kim thing where she's like, at least you get to leave.

The show is always cognizant of class, even within its small slice of characters. But the Daniel thing is so, just hit me right in the solar plexus because my high school experience was full of complete, what's the reverse of a heel turn, a face turn? complete, oh, from kindergarten until 10th grade, I thought we were enemies.

But guess what? We both like being in musicals now? What? You know, like it's possible because people are constantly reinventing themselves and you don't know, you don't know who they are. They don't know who they are. There's something that's so genuine and earned by his mini arc within this episode that his smile when he's having fun is incredible because also it's the first time he smiled like that in 18 episodes of the show. Yeah. And I think that I love that idea of like, it's something that I've observed in teen movies because the teen movies that we grew up on in like the 80s and early 90s, you had these like, well, like freaks and geeks. You had your jocks and your nerds and all this sort of stuff. And it actually, it portrayed this ecosystem of high school that doesn't actually exist. And I love what we've gotten, you know, more recently in the last 10 years with like things like book smart.

or there's a number of great examples, but all these movies that are sort of like, actually high school is more about finding these odd connections you have with people that you thought you had nothing in common with. And actually, aren't we all moving just towards, hey, we're all humans here on this earth? It's also not linear.

Like, all of the entertainment of that era, whether it's the O.C. and Seth Cohen's arc or movies like She's All That, there's only one direction this moves in. People who are nerdy become cool. And maybe they can sometimes make it on their own terms or they can get, they can get the cute girl to listen to Death Cab for Cutie or whatever it may be or

ever it may play out. Yeah. This is not a linear journey. Like people go in all kinds of surprising directions, you know, and Daniel finding happiness playing Dungeons and Dragons is a beautiful expression of that. I love it. And also that they don't, the other thing that's really crucial, I think, about the show is the point of view of the larger project of the show, which is to say, we, you and I

sit here and talk about how what that means for Daniel to have had a good time with these guys, what it means for him. The characters on the show don't learn the lessons. Daniel leaves to get another diet Fago or whatever he's getting and the geeks are like, does this mean we're cool now? And they're legitimately like, I think that's what that means. That's their takeaway from it, which is very sweet. I don't know if it's accurate. Or I mean, yes, but it's also sort of like what is cool because Sam spends the whole episode being like, I would like to be cool or we We can't be on the bottom of the social ladder forever. And then like, I mean, if there's more story to tell, I think the lesson is different.

But if we just leave Sam, we're here, then we hope that the lesson he learned is like, I get to define what's cool for myself. That doesn't seem like a lesson you learn when you're a freshman in high school. But, you know, we can we can hope for Sam. Sam as Paul Figue insert is so interesting to me because then he talks about Neil as an insert for Jud. and then he talks about Lindsay as also an insert for Paul Feig but he has this great quote about how he was like

he was 35 when he made the show and he's like I think the emotional maturity of a 35 year old man is right about where a 16 year old girl is so it's sort of like Lindsay is like his insert for his adult self and then Sam is his insert for his teen self and I think that's delightful I love that I also think

which is one of the sneaky lessons that I wish more shows I mean there's certain themes that are psychologically heavy even if they're not complicated. And it's hard to find the right vehicle to service them to audiences or for artists to explore them. Young people is a great one, but young people entertainment isn't usually this self-aware or this thoughtful, one of which is being, we define ourselves by the chase of the thing that we most want. No one really prepares you for discovering that's not actually

something that you want it. And that is Nick's entire journey on the show. That is Sam with, what's your Cindy, the girl that she pines for and then he finds that he maybe doesn't even really like her. Linda Cardellini and the Vanity Fair piece, I think, phrased it beautiful, beautifully better than I think most critics, which she said, life is filled with moments where you have to sit alone with yourself. And I think the show let our characters do that in a way that wasn't normal at the time. You don't really know what to say or do, so you just have to sit there in the uncomfortableness. Linda, are you my 70-year-old therapist in New York City? Because I've only ever heard two people say it that way. And that's heavy. That's powerful stuff. That she was able to pull that out of the show

is remarkable. That the show did that at all or created space for people to have that space is pretty remarkable. You keep referencing the great Vanity Fair oral history. Speaking of possibly alienating anecdotes about working in media, that happened right when I started work at Vanity Fair. Oh, that's right. You're a veteran. Yeah. Well, like that was my, I think my first month there was when that issue came out. And I was watching, to prep for this, I was watching some of the, like, VF.com, like, video assets they released with the cover story. And what's really funny to me is that the then West Coast editor, who was a bit of a fame chaser, only sat down and interviewed the freaks. They talked to

the geeks in the hallway with someone off camera as, like, a group. But there were individual sits down, sit downs with Bizzy and Linda and James and Jason and Seth. And I was like, Yeah, I mean, they're certainly more famous than Martin Star hadn't been on Silicon Valley yet. John Francis Daly, I don't think, was even, like, you know, doing his writer-director thing yet. He was on bones or something at the time. But I was just sort of like, you freaked and geeked them. Like, you put the geeks in the hallway. I can't believe it very fair.

Though I can't believe it. But when you watch that, one of the many notes I jotted down about why it's good, this show only had one season. One of them is that John Francis Daly gets so tall. and I think it's so important that Sam Ware is just a little guy. They avoided the Stranger Things trap. Yeah, exactly. The other plot line that I love in the finale is very subtle in the background, barely there, but kind of there, is this idea of like,

so Daniel's having this moment with the AV Club, and Nick is having this moment figuring out his thing with disco and this new girlfriend. And then Ken is just sort of left. What happens when you're left behind when you're friends? try to start trying on another personalities. You know what I mean? Like, he sits out, he's, he's shitty about the Lizzie Kaplan character, right? Like, he's, he's not, the next episode necessarily, but that idea, and you bring up

Stranger Things. I was thinking, stranger things for all its, all its flaws does explore this, is, like, what happens when one of you becomes, gets slotted into another one of those groups, and then, like, can you all stay together? And that was one plotline that they talked about doing for Bill is making Bill a jock. And then what does that do to the geeks if Bill becomes a jock? And I think that that's the strongest argument for the show continuing other than, like, my God, what a wealth of talent. And there's so much, it's just a world you want to be in like all great shows is that Paul Feig talked about this being the central tenant of his understanding of both high school and also the show, which is that it's constantly moving.

The barriers are shifting. So this was a preview in a sense of what it was going to look like where it would not be the same in the sense that, you know, when you're an adult, three or four years is nothing. When you're in high school, it is, you know, everything. Oh, yeah. It's like if everyone swap sides on Game of Thrones between seasons. Thanks for putting in terms I understand, Andy.

I meet my co-host where she is, you know, at any moment. And the Ken thing, I'm glad you brought that up too, because it is really important to note that everyone ends in this episode. episode and where do they end? And one thing that I think is subtle, it's not just that he's reacting to people changing on him. It's that his significant character beat happens in the previous episode where he's having a romantic storyline, which is rare for the character of Ken. And the person that he's involved with reveals that she was born intersex, which is incredibly ahead of its time type of storyline handled with. And I did not rewatch this episode, so I cannot speak to the

particular stuff. I remember just being remarkably sensitive. and engaging as an episode. So he has an experience in that episode that is also very relevant to a lot of people's high school experience, which is what happens when the most significant things in your life are not happening in the cafeteria

or are not things that you can joke about under the bleachers that happen just to you and where are those lines? And so if you think about that last episode and his anger and his reactive coming from having something that he is not sharing, it reminds you how rich each person's in her life.

is. And Andy, would you say this is why it's important to air episodes in order when you're putting a TV show on NBC? Call me crazy. Call me crazy, but that would help. It would help. It is so, you know, it's, when you think about it, and this is any creator would be like this for any show throughout history, but Fee and Apatow talk about how they had these episodes that just weren't airing, but the network said, finish them. You're canceled, but finished the episode. So they took three months in post, you know, agonizing over every cut and needle drop, we appreciate it now, but like everything did matter for them. So the episode culminates in Lindsay becoming a deadhead,

and getting on the bus, at least for a summer, having this beautiful goodbye. She kisses Sam, she kisses Sam. She kisses Sam, he's her brother, but she kisses Neil and Bill also, which is very funny because Neil brought her chocolates and Bill did nothing. and save money, but still got a kiss.

Becky Ann Baker, this podcast has only existed for a few episodes. Tearful goodbye as a mother already in two episodes, because we talked about girls. Yeah. She's so good. You know, Becky Ann Baker has talked about how she said goodbye to Lindsay, and she basically said goodbye to Linda Cardalini in that relationship in that scene, which makes it even more. I mean, not that they never spoke again, but that was the last time they were on a screen together, I think.

Was it if they were filmed out of order? Well, great point. So it wasn't. But she's talking about it in a sentimental way. Yeah, mentally. Yeah. Then they went back and she was just like, go to your room. Yeah.

All of a sudden, Hollywood. She gets off the bus and runs into the arms of... Samara Armstrong. Of Kelly and Samira Armstrong, who, by the way, sidebar, have you Googled recently? Yes. I have. Yes. She was a very big deal.

She plays the hippie on this show. She was on the O.C. she was a up-and-coming star in Hollywood, had some personal issues, and then sort of disappeared from the screen as far as I was aware. I see now that she just ran for mayor of her hometown of Sedona, Arizona, on a platform of keeping masks off of our kids and Antifa, BLM being a Marxist front.

So, life's a journey. Life's a journey. Anyway, she runs into the van, Grateful Dead plays, and she drives off into the beautiful Paisley unknown of her future. I think that it's telegraphed enough that you're not, oh my God, this came out of nowhere. She has this sort of transformative, you know, musical dance in her room.

Again, almost famous, Let a Candleoio to your future sort of moment. So you can't imagine that what follows that is her just dutifully going to academic camp, you know? And also these deadheads have been sort of giving her the, Hard sell all episodes. Super hard sell. I saw on Reddit that someone actually tracked the tour dates she would have seen. They were posting the Dead's summer 81 tour schedule. Seems like she would have had a good time.

But also, like, I mean, I know the Dead were still playing shows into the 90s, but like I think it's interesting that Nick and, to your point about like trying things on and seeing where you fit, like that they're both trying on these sort of musical movements on their way out, right? They're not chasing like the hottest, newest thing. You know, touring with the dead is an old thing. It just goes on its way out for Nick. In a previous episode, Daniel flirts with punk, but it's not like New Wave, which is where we were in the larger culture in 81.

It's like mid to late 70s punk. And I think that's also a beautiful thing about the show, which is that you couldn't stay current. I mean, kids couldn't stay current in any place, maybe in New York or L.A., but like trends were slow. Oh, sure. We didn't live in this constant immediate present. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's, I think there's something's very appropriate, but also very, it makes it, it takes the sting out of it. None of them are chasing cool because it's ephemeral and how could they even get to it. How about you? Were you surprised by the dead ending? Yes, because I think I was a rule follower and I would have been like, oh, an academic summit. Oh, good for my future.

Wow, she'll do well. She'll probably meet some peers. And also when I came on, I was still like, because I was very, you know, building her identity, still a little tribal. When I was 22 or 23, I was like, dead sucks. Like that sucks. I no longer feel that way on any level. And think, in fact, it's the perfect ending because it's also telegraphed. The pilot, she's resisting being a athlete and figuring out her identity.

And, you know, like all of them. And I was saying a moment ago about Nick being like, am I being reactive or is this true to me? Lindsay's been reactive the whole time. She's reacting to her grandmother's death. She's reacting to the pressure and the pressure from her parents, but also the love she has for them. She aligns, she smokes when she doesn't want. I mean, she's trying stuff out as you should at that age,

but none of it is completely her own. This, I mean, Samir Armstrong aside, this feels like something that it's not connected to her other friends, so she tries it. One of the things that I think is really, in retrospect, kind of beautiful, though it was clearly crushing for those involved, is that Paul Feig's vision of how the show might end. Again, they were very much hoping it would get renewed,

and they were probably planning on how Lindsay would get back from this trip. But the vision that he offered as a hedge being like, this could be the ending, but we're still in this, is in some ways what ended the show. What I mean is the ratings were bad. It did not, the vibes were not good. Yes. The chances of renewal were small.

But according to interviews done since in the year since, Scott Sasseh, who was Garth Ansir's deputy, he was the head of West Coast programming or whatever the title was. I'll just read Judd Appetow's quote. I only found out later that when Scott Sassa saw the cut of the finale and he saw them get in the van, he realized we would never do the things that would make the show commercial. And that doesn't take away from the fact that Scott was the biggest supporter of the show. It's only good because he gave us creative leeway. But that's the funny thing about this work.

You can do something you really like and someone else looks at it and says, I need to end this today. So Scott Sasa was always meeting with him, encouraging them, giving them a chance. Judd Apatow credits him. And if you read other things about the time, apparently Apatatau was a screamer. Apparently, he was a nightmare to deal with fighting for his creative things. He was difficult. He was very, very challenging, according to people who were on his side and those who weren't. And even, but yet he was willing to say that this guy was helping them.

They showed him what they were doing to try to have it both ways. And he was like, forget it. Agree to disagree. Yeah. So in a way, it's almost perfect, right? I don't think there could be anything more joyful than Lindsay. This is a win for Lindsay, right? This is her doing, this is such a beautiful teenage thing to do.

And it's a win for Daniel to play D&D with the, you know, this episode, my view, is full of wins. I mean, but also if your show's not performing, your show's not performing, that's the brutal truth of it too. But I do think all the time about all these other shows that got, never mind two, like seven seasons. or whatever. And I'm like, that and not freaks and geeks, that and not my so-called life was happening. But I think one way to think of, and we said this at the beginning,

Apatow is like, I just consider everything I've done in response to this or out of spite for this. He's like, knocked up, that's Ken. That's just if Ken was living later and, like, you know, met Catherine Hegel or whatever. Yeah. I also think it's worth underlining the fact that, like,

one of the reasons it's good is because it never had a chance to get bad. Even the best intentions behind television, television show, almost all of them just get rolled by the nature, just the demanding nature of year after year, episode after episode, storyline after storyline, cast churn, audience response, like, or even you just get sentimental and you start writing towards what you love to or you want to celebrate the actor or the performer or the good vibes. And it's impossible. And for a show that was about how life is, like I said at the beginning, that quote to the Nick quote from the pilot about how

life kind of sucks. This is a show about minor victories and major embarrassments. And there's no way, there was no way for the show to satisfy in a big ticket broadcast way. I mean, what is the happy ending here, the win that Garth Anseer wanted? Is it that Sam will become Paul Figue when he's 40? It's just not built that way. And I, so I really landed on this idea. And I think we could get into it a little bit in the time we have left. Like, ultimately, this was the right thing. There's not just all the beautiful things you mentioned about sort of what can happen to even the most brilliant premise, great cast, because you see this happen all the time. The first season is this inferno of creativity and excitement and then it peters or falls off a cliff. Rarely, though we can point to some examples, rarely does a show build and build and build and build. Usually it goes downhill necessarily. But I think it's fascinating. when Paul Figue talks about the very storylines

they had in mind for characters and was wild to me in comparing this to my so-called life, both the creator of my so-called life and Paul Fieg have talked about how they want to take a character and do a teenage pregnancy storyline in season two, Kim Kelly for this and Cheratursky

in my so-called life. And in both cases, I was like, well, I don't want that. I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want that for that character. I don't want it for the TV show. I don't think that's right. And it's interesting is that because this is Paul Fieg's like Lady Bird, this is his very autobiographical story of specific place, specific time,

he has all these stories in mind. And I think sometimes I say like the more specific you get, the more universal you get because you just drill down into a truth. But I think some of the what-ifs that he has thrown out there for the various characters, it's hard for me to know because we'll never know how they would have done it. But I'm just sort of like, I feel like we're moving further and further away from a story that feels like everyone can find some version of that that applies to them to this is specifically only for these characters. This happens a lot in teen shows. Second season of Friday Night Lights is a great example.

Yes. And then what's even worse is when a teen high school show tries to become a college show. Oh, yeah. That's the, you know, like Veronica Mars or Buffy or saved by the bell, the college. a cheers or now 210, whatever your poison is, like it almost never transfers out of that high school setup. And I'm always, I'm like, just end it. Or make them stay in high school for six years. I'm not counting. It's fine. Go ahead and do that, you know? All shows are constantly living, evolving promo reels for their own existence. And the suggestion is that whatever you're

seeing has to be very important. It stakes. This is the most important thing in their lives. Freaks and Geeks is based on the idea that high school really shouldn't be the most important time of your life. The longer these characters stayed in high school and had wacky and wackier adventures happen to them, the more disjointed and unbalanced that would have become, right? Where suddenly like, how could their potential futures, which is the, which it really is like the ninth main character, right? The uncertain cloud of what comes next. That just diminishes. I also think it's worth noting, and I was really struck by this, watching the show again to the degree that I did, reading the interviews.

This show is Figue and Apatow's punk rock phase. They were leaving it all out there. They were fighting back. They were ignoring notes. They were being scrappy. They were being true to some deep cynicism and darkness that still existed in them. And they were so new when they did like, where did they get that, you know? And they weren't playing well with others except within their own troop.

It's funny to hear them talk about how the network always wanted them to have wins. Because honestly, much of their later careers seem entirely about wins. Like, what's the narrative about Judd-Apatown now? It's that he takes misfits and normalizes them through, like, heteronormative marriage and reproduction. Like, every movie that he makes a character who's on the outskirts gets welcomed in to the bosom of a traditional family, more or less. Like, I'm speaking very generally. Yeah, I know what you mean? But, like, that is the thing that he's become known for.

And what is that, if not, like, giving people the feel-good wins that they want? Like, it's, it's, I'm sure he would admit it, too. It's a little bit softer. And Feege has had, as I said, he seems to have had a very happy career. And he, like, shepherding younger talent and working with younger people and executive producing things, et cetera, et cetera. But he didn't rip open his belly and show us his entrails like this again. You know, he's now more of a steward of acceptable or palatable content. I used to say, like, once you've made your almost famous Cameron Crow, like, where do you go from there?

You buy a zoo. I mean, if Matt Damon's involved, I'll buy that zoo. But then Greta started there, you know, and has only gone on and on to do other things. So it's not necessarily like everyone who shows their belly in that way then is sort of cringing. But it might be, yeah, this is what happened with Paul. And what's fascinating is that he put out, I guess, like a couple books of stories from his hometown that, you know, could have been fodder for future seasons. or John Appetalde talked about this in an interview. Like it was a really commonly known thing, but I didn't know this,

that they had every one of their writers in their writers room fill out a 20-question survey about all these things. You know, was your most embarrassing moment? Was this that and the other thing to give all these like personal stories? But then the mix, this is why you have a writer's room people. But like. And then he circulated it with credit. So it was not anonymous? So like the Gabe Sax and Jeff Jee.

to a writing team where like the thing about the how you find out your dad's cheating on your mom was like one of them said it was from me but I didn't want everyone to know that. But like, yeah, maybe anonymize it, but I'm just like, that's a brilliant. I mean, I know that that's what a writer's room in its most ideal form is, is that people share their stories, put it, but like to sort of put it all out there in the beginning for Paul Fieke to say this is my very personal story about me, but also we're all making this together. I don't know. I love a writer's room. I think it's ultimately It's hard to say it in 2000 or even 2005, but like, I'm really happy that no one got,

everyone just got to, everyone was just on the same. They were all new. They were all trying it out all at the same time. And I didn't mean to imply, like, I just think that we see the larger arc of Judd-Apitao's career, and it's worked for him in his personal happiness and his professional success. But so I don't mean it in a pejorative way,

but it's clear that, like, he would have, if he was trending that way in his life, season four and five of Freaks and Geeks might have trended that way too in a way that way. in a way that we would be doing a podcast about this episode as the end of the golden era of this perfect first season. There were highs and lows, whatever, later on. And, you know, if I had been more prepared for this podcast, I probably could have named three stars that debuted. Like Ryan Gosling going from the Mickey Mouse Club to this show and, you know, and he was in season three and his arc as the troubled whatever.

You know, it would have jumped started or there would have been more references. There would have been more content to draw from. But instead, we just have this perfect statement. And so this brings me to just the last thing, which is, is like it's easy to see the influence of the show and how important it was, outsize importance in terms of its graduates who came out of it. I think it's harder to see its influence in terms of like a one-to-one this show that we love today doesn't exist without it.

I wish we had more shows like this or with this voice now. And I wonder if, I hope you disagree with me. I wonder if there are some things that you can draw from it. I mean, certainly you can say a show ending, correctly, even if it wasn't intentional, has been influential. Because we do live in an era where people call their own shots more and say, I'm done, or this is done, or I agree, we'll write towards this point. That did not happen as much then. But Freaks and Geeks isn't alone in pioneering that.

I mean, just generally people are like, I don't want to make 400 episodes. I want to make 20. Yeah. Where else do you see this particular influence of this show, particularly how it ended? I think about the teen show as sort of this art form all the time because it was at its apex when I was a teen. And then I just sort of, you know, it's similar to people saying what happened to the rom-com. I'm like, what happened to the teen show? Like Josh Schwartz comes along and I love the OC and I love Gossip Girl.

I love a lot about them. But he pulls the trend in a different, like even further away, I would say, from, you know, the not. not reality of Dawson's Creek into like the not reality of adult soap adult soap but as acted by teens um but i do think some of the stuff that we see more recently unfortunately like the best examples i can think of around Netflix but stuff like never have I ever or atypical like there's a few of these like sort of Netflix teen shows that i think are lifting a lot from what both my so-called life and freaks and geeks were trying to do which is um we're not doing adult soap We're not doing 9-02-0.

That's not what we're doing. These are kids and these are kid problems. And they're so imperfect. And let's celebrate the imperfections. And let's celebrate, let's take shame out of the equation. And let's just say, like, it's great to play. Doesn't D&D look fun in this episode? Genuinely, I've never played it.

But it looks so fun here. I'm here to tell you. I was, and maybe some might say still am the target audience for it. I've never really had fun playing it because I love making a character and building a world and reading, what's that? There's so much math, it seems like.

But there's someone to help you with that. There's like the dungeon master. But my thing is like when I was a kid, like I wanted to create these characters but then when you actually sat down to roll dice and like walk around, like it always fell apart. I didn't have the focus.

I didn't have the rigor that those guys had. But I think that your point is the right one And it's one of those things that isn't complicated, but it's just clearly incredibly hard, which is to just be able to mainline the emotional truth of a certain moment in your life when these are the things that mattered, you know, that the stakes, you don't need murder like the second season of Friday Night Lights to make it feel important. Because every day it was life or death, even if it actually isn't, if you were the grown-up in the situation, right?

And then to bring us into someone's home, bring us into their hearts, And then to do with people who you believe, because that's the, we keep referring to the genius of the cast. But, you know, the great Alison Jones cast the show. They cast it in a very non-traditional way and then protected it. You know, getting that cast onto NBC in 1999 is wild. Well, but isn't the approach that they took, the same approach that they took with Frontin'It Lights where they cast these actors? Yeah. And then they sort of built the characters on top of the personas of the people.

And that feels the most true when you try to see Taylor Kitch do literally anything else. and you're like, oh, no, no, no, you just are Tim Regans. Okay, like I see that. Yeah, that's where your best act. But it's true. I think they talked about how Figue's original version of this had the geeks down pat because that was his experience, but the freaks were a little broader. Right.

And Aptow made him, it seems like he made him rewrite this 100 times, but also they rebuilt those characters around Jason Siegel and Seth Rogen and James Franco once they had him. Some funny anecdotes that, like, Feig and Apatow thought James Franco was really good but also really funny looking, which made him perfect. And then we're very confused when the people around the production office were talking about how handsome he was. They're like, oh, really? That guy? I don't get it. I don't see it. That guy with a weird mouth. When I've done the other episodes of the show, I've often ended with a metric that Bill introduced,

which is like the five ways shows typically end. I think that this show kind of defies the metric, which is unsurprising. I think the metric lasted four or five episodes of a podcast. But a lot of it comes from the idea. that it was intentional. And so as we said, this was intentional and intentional ending. So here's the metric that he's given me. To answer the question, did the show stick the landing?

And the five categories are, they landed the plane, they took a big swing, and it was super fucking polarizing. It's better if you hear this in Bill's Force. I can hear it, though. They fucked it up. Yeah. Four, they limped to the finish line. Five, it didn't seem like they landed the plane,

but in retrospect, maybe they did. Do any of those jump out to you as relevant to this show in this episode? I think it's just kind of simply they landed the plane. I'm curious how Lindsay's summer went. And I'm curious what Nick is going to do about this, that the other thing. And I'm curious if Daniel is actually going to go play Dungeons and Dragons again the next night. Like, I am curious about their futures, but I don't feel like I'm left hanging in unresolved in any sort of way. And so I just feel satisfied.

And then I get to imagine what their futures are. And that's sort of fun because you become co-creator of these characters' futures. and so I just think they stick the landing. Option one. You carry them with you, and that's part of the relationship that we have with television versus all other mediums.

I mean, it's worth noting MTV swooped in and said, we will continue this show. We would love to engage with conversations with you, but almost immediately it was clear that they were going to reduce the budget to a fraction of what it was,

and they wouldn't be able to have the needle drops and the cast would get smaller. And again, punk rock era, they were like, no, we do it this way or we don't do it at all. It is wild that they have like the Who and Grateful Dead, all these needle drops in here are just insane.

And that's why it was off streaming for years. People should know that. That was the reason. It wasn't like because busy Phillips said no. I agree with you. In fact, I would just rephrase the category, and I would say that what's beautiful, but an important, dare I say, about the show,

is that the finale, the plane takes off. I think that we overvalue resolution. I think we over-inflate the importance of answering questions, and I think that's become like a cancel. of our modern entertainment. And what's beautiful about this is, yes, this is the end because it creates this wide vista of space

for our, like what Linda Cardellini said, to sit with, to think about, to populate with our own emotions about how we felt about those last scenes versus what a good future would look like. Because ultimately, as an audience, your judgment comes into it. If Lindsay comes back and is now a quote unquote burnout

or smokes dope or X, Y, or Z thing, the audience is like, I disagree. She should have done this. I never want a Freaks and Geeks reboot reunion. Never. This is frozen as it should be because they're made up. We get to live with, we have our own lives where we have resolution. They shouldn't.

I agree. I was thinking about this in comparison to some other finalees and how, be it like Thrones or Buffy or like a number of other finale that I've thought a lot about, when you can almost feel someone ticking a box. Okay, have we done, have we tied this thread up? Have we tied this thread up, you know, this character? Have we given that person their flowers? Yeah, did this person get their moment?

Did this person get their moment? And it just feels so, you know, checklisty. And what I like about this is like, you know, to your point earlier, like, Ken's big episode is a penultimate episode. So he's not much in this episode, but that's okay. Because sometimes you're not in the front of the story. But I think if we were five seasons in and we were saying goodbye tearfully to all these characters, we would need a Ken moment. We would need that's the other thing, and that would feel forced in some way. I like that it's important that things go ever on, that the plane takes off.

I love all of that. It's also important that things end, and we are so diseased with this idea that we have to regurgitate, reboot, revisit. And it's just sometimes the ending is what makes, I mean, always the ending is what makes it, that it is finite is what makes it important. Yeah. Yeah, I love what you said. Lindsay made a choice to not go to the academic summit and to tour around with her best friend and these new people in her life. And the longer the show goes on, the more that decision is softened. She has penance.

She feels sorry. She has to deal with the punishment. She has to deal with the consequences. And then nothing really changes, though, because it's the next year of school. And then there has to be something bigger, a bigger fork in the road for her to reach. That's the nature of TV. And I think you and I are similar in that we like the machinery of TV. Like I like seeing writers solve problems like that or work within challenges.

When I talked about the Mad Men finale, it's like the first time I watched it, I didn't like the Peggy and Stan stuff because I felt the hand of the creator servicing something. I was wrong. It's actually wonderful. It's wonderful, yeah. But this is free. It's blessedly free of the hand of the marketplace or the create. It's just the record stops playing, right? you just reach the end of the track. It stops playing, but it's still like,

you get that sort of like static, the needle is bumping, the record's still going, sort of feeling, you know? Yeah, and it makes me, I'm smiling thinking about that. Like, I love that about the show. It's a wonderful finale,

but like, in light of this aspect of the conversation, I think it's a really important one that I think has a lot of lessons for people to draw from. What a profound journey we just went on. We are, I thought we were just driving off in a van. No.

No, I think we actually had a plan, and I'm proud of us. Samara Armstrong, you're not invited on this journey, but everyone else. No, we'll drive you to Arizona, but we're going to then continue on. Good luck with your political career. Joanna Robinson, of course, you could listen to you on Ringerverse, House of Our, Proceded Television Podcasts, read you on the Ringer. What else should I be plugging?

Your book, your MCU book, which I love, as in bookstores. That's it. You did it. You read my book. That's the kindest gift anyone can give another person. So, thank you. It's genuinely true. But I enjoyed it. It was no hardship. Thank you for doing this with me.

I hope we do it again on a future episode of Stick the Landing. This episode of Stick the Landing was produced by Kai McMullen and Kai Grady, and our theme music was composed by my good friend, Giancarlo Volcano.