Hanging out with Freaks and Geeks

Everyone has been talking about Seth Rogen and James Franco during the past weeks because of The Interview. Certainly a hullaballoo of this kind—a nation outraged not by a real assassination but by one pretended in a bad comedy—deserves all the rubbernecking our trapezius muscles can stand. But thanks to Netflix, my husband and I have been getting to know Rogen and Franco in a different light entirely: as reprobate, post-pubescent school-skippers in the 1999 network television show Freaks and Geeks. And unlike the impossible mixer party we call international politics—particularly the part where North Korea storms out in a huff after the comics step on its toes—our experience of Rogen and Franco has been a pleasure and a half.

Freaks and Geeks follows two 1980s high school cliques: the freaks, a gaggle of stoners with rough home lives, and the geeks, a trio of kind but shrimpy freshman nerds. The series’ main plot involves Lindsay Weir, a math whiz who finds herself increasingly lured into the stoner crowd. But the show defies the popular hospital analogy kids hear at youth group: “You don’t visit people in the hospital to impart your health to them. If anything, they’ll make you sick.” To Lindsay, the freaks are more than prodigals. With patience, we find out she’s right.

The show, placed in an unfortunate time slot, found itself overshadowed by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and heard its death knell before the close of its first season. That’s something to grieve about. Because every event in Freaks and Geeks finds its inspiration in the real lives of its creators, and it delivers an authenticity that will cause your heart to alternately break and rejoice. You develop real love for the characters, which pass through scenery purposely dulled so that sunny California could pass as a ho-hum city in the Midwest. You see a boy discover his father’s affair, a girl stand up for the mentally handicapped, a total geek find his first love reciprocated—and much more.

You will point to the screen and say, “Isn’t that true?” You feel that the characters’ fears are your fears—because they actually are. And like the critics and fans who affectionately watched in 1999, you will feel tragic when the show draws to a premature close. Sweet as Regis Philbin could be, and novel as it seemed to ask the audience or phone a friend, Millionaire starts to look paltry beside the humane masterpiece it outsold.

My husband, a creative to his core, has been faithfully dusting from my mind the misconception that watching television is a flat waste of time. To accept the arrogant idea that television does us no good, you have to dismiss a mountain of artistic vocations intended not to dull us but to make us more human. If, like me, you missed the boat in 1999, Netflix has your back. Go hang out with the Freaks and Geeks—and do it with your heart turned on.