Freaks and Geeks Review

NBC put it on Saturday nights, pre-empted it repeatedly, asked Paul Feig and Judd Apatow to let the characters win more often, and cancelled it with six episodes unaired. What survives is eighteen hours of teenagers who actually look like teenagers, bad skin and worse haircuts, in a Michigan high school in 1980 where very little happens and all of it stings. Linda Cardellini's Lindsay Weir trades the mathletes for an army jacket and the burnouts, and the show is honest enough to make that neither a liberation nor a mistake.

The casting is the famous part and it deserved the Emmy it won: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Busy Philipps, Martin Starr and John Francis Daley, all of them before anyone knew what they were. Starr's Bill Haverchuck eating a grilled cheese sandwich in front of the television while Alice Cooper plays is the best minute in the series and nothing happens in it. The writing refuses payoffs on principle, which is also the honest criticism: a viewer who wants plot finds a run of small humiliations in no particular order, and the geeks get thinner material than the freaks.

It is shot like 1999 network television, flat and bright. None of that matters. Nobody has done adolescence better, and the people who made it spent twenty years afterwards making comedies that were not this good.