Freaks & Geeks: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your two burnouts of banality, your geeks of good natured nursery, your freaks of facts. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Runtock. I try not to read ahead to see what you're gonna say. See where I'm going with? Yeah, today, Jordan, we are talking about one of the most cultishly beloved shows around the turn of the century, which still feels weird every time I say it, but I'm going to keep doing it. The eighteen episodes that launched a thousand ships and inspired countless air drumming sessions. That's right, we're talking about freaks and geeks. I have very dim memories of watching this show when it was airing, but apparently I might have Mandela affected it, considering it was on for like two concern keetive weeks and then just moved around constantly. But I remember watching it. I might might have confused it with one years though, but yeah, I really only caught up with it long after it was done, and I don't know. I was a little bit between freaking a geek in high school, I was. I was. I hung out with the dirty punk rock kids and played punk rock. But I was also in a competition entering and winning jazz band. I was. Yeah, And I was also in Shakespeare Club, so that I played king there and one of the weird sisters. Uh um. But I wondered when we pitched this if because this was happening at the tail end of the seventies, it was going to fall outside of your wheelhouse. You're absolutely right. Yeah, you know. This was something that I never watched, and I deeply regret it. I never watched any of it. He loved it, Yeah, you know. I mean, here's what happens. This has been recommended to me so many times over the years, I think even when it was on, because I loved Wonder years as a kid, and I do this thing when too many people recommend something to me that I just add of some mix of rebellion and no, I'm not. You don't know me, and I've missed out on so many great things over the years, and this was one of them. But you're right. Partially is I think maybe one of my least favorite years in pop culture history. Aesthetically, sonically, it's the year John Lennon was killed. I don't know, it's got a lot of knocks against it for me, just not my thing. So yeah, the show I was always kind of tainted for me for that reason, which is dumb. But also I just kind of got the sense that it was going to be almost more like that seventies show two point Oh. I thought it was gonna be this very broad, gross out, almost fratty style comedy. But you know, in the last week or so, I've caught up on about half the series or so and got the highlights from the rest of the episodes, and I was just blown away by how heartfelt and sweet it was and real it was. I mean, they really were swinging for the Wonder Years territory and this show it just went deep. I mean, in the pilot episode, we learned that the main character, Linda, kind of Lenny's character, Lindsay, was alone with her grandma when she died, and now she's dealing with this crisis of faith, faith in God, faith in the whole, faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe, whatever you wanna call it. This true loss of innocence. And this isn't like you know, Eugene from Greece or Revenge of the Nerds. It's like a lot more nuance and heartfelt than I ever thought, which is you know why it's lived on and continued to resonate with so many Yeah, I mean, heart is really the watchword for this. It's just the one that comes back and back and back. And you know, people throw that around with sitcoms, and there's a lot of things that I don't like, um like Parks and Wreck. It's like sincere and heartfelt, but it's in such a contrived in sitcomy way, whereas the show is really just like here's a bunch of characters you like, and here are the mix the entire spectrum of human experience that they will be subject to. I just think it's so clever from just even in the opening shot of the pilot where they have the attractive football player and his letterman jacket and the beautiful cheerleader having a corny heart to heart like heathcliff On, the more tight moment on the bach just keeps going for the hands right down to these like freaks congregating like ants under a rock under the bleachers, and they're smoking pot and talking about Molly Hatchet. It's just such a clear declaration of what this show was, these stories about kids that you didn't usually see on TV, at least up to that point. You know, usually shows and movies dealt with either geeks in a cartoonish way with tape on their glasses and pocket protectors, or you know, you got Dawson's Creek Syndrome with these gorgeous like early twentysomethings with gray hair and perfect skin that's coming out of coming out of nine two and Home Roast, and and then you got all the weep w B stuff where again everyone is still like a model. Yeah. I mean, I think in real life most of worked, you know in the quote rich jock, popular crowd or the nerd category. We were somewhere in the middle. And you know, I think it's a newcomer to freaks and geeks. Every episode had at least one incident that I connected with on a deeply embarrassing, almost primal personal level. Uh. Down to the pilot, I love that with a scene where at the end of the pilot when the littlest geeks Sam gets to dance with his crush to come sail Away at the school dance and he thinks this this romantic slow dance, and then right when he gets on the dance floor, the rock section starts and he panics because slow dancing is the only kind of dancing that socially awkward people can handle. I speak from experience, and the look at his face is hilarious. It's like he's been betrayed by God. But literally, that same thing happened to me, except it was with Stairway to Heaven. For some reason, the big last dance song at my high school was Stairway to Heaven, and uh yeah, and then when the fast part would start, I wouldn't know what to do. So yeah, but unlike me, the kid on a show actually starts to enjoy himself, and the show's creator Paul fig said of that moment, what seems like not really a victory is actually a victory, and that's what this show is all about. I like that. Yeah, Well, from the deep roster of real life experiences. Judd Apatow drew on to write for the show. To the lengthy battle over the extensive musical playlist that soundtrack it to the perhaps odd. I actually don't know how common this is, but I'm I go ahead and call it odd. The odd lengths that the wardrobe department went through to ensure accuracy for the period clothing. Here is everything you didn't know about Freaks and Geeks. Did you notice that I made all of these headers rush songs? Good? At the heart of Freaks and Geeks is the comic duo pairing I don't know, Yeah, yeah, Judd Apatow and Paul Feig, who met in the l A comedy scene in the mid eighties. As Avatau explained for Vanity Fairs incredible oral history of the show, he met Fig at the Ranch, which was quote, this incredibly cheap house a bunch of comedians rented really deep in the boonies in the San Fernando Valley. It was all these guys who would come out to l A from the Midwest and all they did was smoked cigarettes and watch infomercials. That's amazing. It sounds like members of my extended family, um Fig said. Judd was younger than everyone else. He was really considered to be just a kid. But at the same time, he was booking his own stand up night at some club working for Comic Relief. So by the nineties, Apatow had a development deal at DreamWorks, which seems wild based on what he actually got it on, which was Ben Stiller's show Larry Sanders Show, which are obviously critically beloved things, but it wasn't like he was known as the showrunner for that. And then he had Heavyweights, which was also Paul Figue is in that, and Paul figue was also in something called Ski Patrol I remember thing about and I guess he had also been on Sabrina the Teenage, which is Mr Pool the teacher of the first season means nothing to me, uh, dirty dancing, good sports, so kind of an what you might call him under the radar television career. Ready waits rips. We should tell you that it also has Sean Weiss, the kid from Mighty Ducks, who had a recurring role on Freaking Geeks and as All Things Do, Yes they come Back, had a bit part in My Beloved That thing you do as a DJ. It's like it's such a great little like understated scene in the movie. He's just like this DJ. He's like, all right, everybody. We got the wonders in here, say hi, guys, and they're all just say hi, and then he just plays a song. It's like, all right, guys, thanks for coming on in. Just lets him go like that's all they That's all they needed. Well, in between all of that, or I guess. After all that, he wrote, directed and start in an independent feature called Life, sold separately, but he sunk all of his resources into promoting that didn't really go anywhere, and he'd also lost the Sabrina gig. So he said to Vanity Fair, everything had kind of hit the rocks. I was really at my lowest point. So he pivoted to this long unrealized goal he had of writing about his high school experience. He told Vulture, I told my wife, I want to write a pilot. I have an idea based on when I was in high school. It's about the nerds and the burnouts, and it's called Freaks and Geeks. She high fived me. Uh. And then I wrote it in two weeks and I gave it to my wife and she said, you've got to send this to Judd. Within twelve hours, he said, I love it. I want to do this. I guess, he had kind of an open invitation from Judd Apataw to like send them any any ideas that he was working on. I think Judd specifically said years later, like, yeah, I didn't actually think he would, but when he took him up on it, and Judd loved it. It's worth noting that Fox had recently passed on another of Judd Apata's idea, a pilot called Sick in the Head, which was a sitcom about a rookie psychiatrists first days working in the psych ward and David krum Holtz was cast in the lead and a pre snl Amy Poehler played one of his suicidal patients. Comedy history could have been completely different if that show got picked up. He probably wouldn't have been working on Freaks and Geeks. But Freaks and Geeks was really going in the face of you know, we mentioned the stuff of the episode, all the usual teen shows that were out there, which more often than not focused on the popular kids or how the underdog succeeded. This was basically how the unpopular kids failed but survived anyway, Judd Apatow told The New York Times, Paul was very passionate about the show. Being about kids who failed at the things that they were attempting to do during high school. It was an argument against wish fulfillment television. I love that line. Um Fiegels, who pegged and a sort of unlikely source of inspiration for the show, to the Washington Post. He told them my friend Matt Reeves at the time had just created Felicity with J. J. Abrams, and I saw the pilot, remember thinking that's such a great way to do a show, an hour long show. I'll write a spec pilot with an hour long show just to do something. I came up with the name Freaks and Geeks first. That is a bizarre thing to me to see that Felicity inspired Freaks and Geeks. Yeah, that's pretty weird. He tells the story in one of the zillion oral histories that I read about Freaks and Geeks that he was out on the road doing stand up just to try to bring some money in because all his acting gigs had dried up. And I think he was in wookes Barre, Pennsylvania, and he was he had just started writing the pilot for Freaks and Geeks and he was kind of walking around near the venue before his show, and he saw a group of teenagers and he saw this one girl in it who was like he could kind of tell, like didn't really fit in with all the toughs, but she was like kind of trying to kind of make it in that group. And he just said that he saw her and just was like, Oh, that's the one I want to write about. I want to write about that. That was the Lindsay character. He's he just saw this face just in the crowd, and that kind of became his inspiration for Lynda Carnalini's character m But yeah, one of the things that stuck out about me while watching this show for the first time is that it's so weird that a show like this is an hour long. I mean, usually dramas get the hour long treatment, but I'm hard pressed I think of a show that has as much comedy as Freaksing Geeks that gets the hour long treatment. And they talk about this in the documentary that came out a few years ago on A and E. But yeah, it's basically impossible to understate what a weird show this was for its time. Even the director thought when they watched the pilot back, you know, this is great, but it doesn't really feel like a pilot because they were really very few single camera sitcoms at the time. Again, that was something that was reserved for dramas. Sitcoms were half hour and multi camera. Think of Friends, think of Frasier, think of all those types of shows. Do you want to do a sidebar on single camera versus multi camera? The way I think of single cameras that it basically looks like a movie, whereas multi camera um is I love Lucy style. I think they kind of pioneered it where you've got a bunch of cameras set up on a stage set that looks almost like a a set, and they can film it a lot quicker like that. That's why you can do it in front of a live studio audience is basically taping up play. But single camera is more like doing a movie. And uh yeah, Freaks and Geeks was this strange mix in both in its format and also thematically, and to hear the creators and executives tell it, and obviously this is a gross over simplification. It seems mostly like shows were either these like glamorous shows set in New York or l A. You're you're just shoot Mese, You're suddenly Susan's your Frasier's guess. Frasier was Seattle, but Seattle ends. Yeah, you know, like like these very urban type shows or these teen dramas in these small towns like Dawson's Creek, Charmed Buffet, The Vampire Slayer, Friday Night Lights, those types of shows. Uh, if you squint, Freaks and Geeks was a bit of that seventies show mixed with Malcolm in the Middle, but the new ingredient that they brought was set at the top of the episode heart and the humor in Free and Geeks was behavioral. It wasn't just like a series of setups for jokes, which is kind of the sitcom standard. There's an expression in the industry for sitcoms, at least back then, three jokes a page. I think I remember hearing that in screenwriting school too. The pace of laughs on Freaks and Geeks was a lot slower, which would come back to haunt them. That's why the character movements are also strong, because everything has such time to breathe, you know. It's not just like, bro, I'm up here, sweat might you know, like pounding the floorboards kind of thing. It's like, yeah, exactly, you just like get these nice moments, and that's partially why some of it's so uncomfortable because she just like linger on Jason Siegel's dreams being crushed. Uh yeah, I know. APTL took the script to Dan McDermott, who is then head of DreamWorks Television, and that he told Vanity Fair for their history. Within twenty four hours, I'd say we gotta pass from Fox, from CBS, from ABC. A day or two later, we heard from Shelley McCrory, a development executive NBC. She said, if we don't make this show, quitting the television business. They really thought that Fox would be a big cell because of nine O two one oh and shows like that that have been a big success for that network. Apparently NBC liked it because this was the year that the Todd Salonce movie Welcome to the Dollhouse came out, which was one of the movies that we talked about that inspired cruel intentions. So TV networks were trying to do something in that flavor, which sounds weird, dark art house movie that I can't imagine made a lot of money. But yeah, if he poured himself into the characters as well. He said, Sam Weirds, who I was in high school. Bill Haver Chuck is part of who I was. Neil Schweiber is part of who I was. Lindsay Weirs, who I was in my thirties. Writing the show, My friends and I weren't popular in high school, he had to Vanity Fair. We weren't dating all the time, and we were just trying to get through our lives. It was important to me to show that side. John Francis Daily was that kid who has that just incredible dead pan. Um, he's he's the main and he's like the only kid who looks his age on the show. He was the only one who was his actual age. I think he auditioned at thirteen and was playing the role by fourteen. Um. And he told Vulture, the writers would get together and basically talk about all the worst things that happened to them in their childhood, parents, breaking up, being bullied, all these embarrassing stories. And then he says one that never made it into the shows that Paul dressed up in his mom's clothes. Then all of a sudden, the neighbors came to his door and told him that his mom or his dad was in a terrible car accident, so he ran to the scene completely forgetting he was wearing a dress. His mom saw him wearing her clothes, and it became even more of an issue than the car accident itself. I would love to have seen that film for this show. Uh. Fun fact Jesse Eisenberg, who at that time I think was just the Pepsi girl's sibling. Oh my god, he was not known as he was not Jesse Eisenberg back then. He was the second choice of that character. Shockingly, they met with very little resistance throughout the development process. Uh and Fee explain. We went over to NBC and I remember feeling that new person in the industry kind of indignation, like if they want to change this at all, I'm not going to do the show. So I start to make that speech and Shelly goes, don't change a thing. I just like, yeah, I mean, there was really so much support for this show and then not at all. It just quickly evaporated. But Jason Segal had this great quote in one of the oral histories. I was like, we had the naivety to just think that we could make the best show in the world, and that was just how we approached everything. We hadn't really none of us have really failed enough to know that there could be an alternative. Yeah, Apata said, Paul showed up when we started production with this bible. He'd written about the show hundreds of pages long, with every character in detail, what they wore, their favorite songs. I asked him to write another few episodes to explore the world, and he banged out two more. We took a lot of moments from them and put them into the pilot. I just want to add this allegedly massive show by Bolt was apparently twenty one thousand words, or roughly the length of our script for the back to back Revolver episodes for this show. So the show's pilot is notably one of the only episodes with a tidy, self contained, happy little ending, which the writers decided to implement in case the show didn't get picked up and then the pilot could just live on its own. How would it live on you? They would live on as like a short. I think they just meant that they maybe could have kept the rights and like used it in like a show reel. I don't know whatever. The term probably not a sizzle real if it's a full length pilot. I don't know anything about the entertainment industry. What do you call them? I mean a clip reel, but you wouldn't put full length. You wouldn't put a full length in the clip reel. Well, I guess if you're a director, maybe you would. As a screenwriting major, I was really interested in how they went about writing the scripts for this show, and the writers basically spent their first two weeks together and what they described as an extended group therapy session, which, having been in a lot of these writing rooms before, I could say it is very very much like a group therapy session. Uh. John Apotel said he wanted writers who'd been around and lived life and had done some things, and specifically had done some bad things. So he wrote this questionnaire. I think this is brilliant. He wrote a questionnaire that he distributed to the writers that had questions like, what's the worst thing that ever happened you in high school? What's the best thing to happen to you in high school, what's the most trouble you got into with your parents, what's your best drug experience, what's your worst drug experience? And obviously all writers put their life experiences into these sorts of projects. But I just thought it was really smart, really methodical way to go about leading these people to just plumb the depths of their souls, because you know, that's the kind of stuff that resonates on the screen, these really personal stories. And they would go around the writer's room table and share the most you know, embarrassing story of their lives, and everybody would grown, and you know, they're looking for the most painful thing, and everybody would grown and say, Okay, well that's the one. We'll do it for the episode. And then somebody around the table would chime in say, actually, wait a minute, I got I got one that's worse, and then they would like they just would be constantly one upping each other for teenage humiliation. And like a good example was the episode where um Sam gets the Parisian night suit or that that just go jump suit. That was something that really happened to Paul fig He got this leisure suit onesie and more to school thinking that he was going to be the coolest guy there, and when he arrived, he promptly realized he'd made the biggest mistake of his life. And he said it was fun on the show recreating the most horrific moment of my past shut appens out. He always talks about how whenever Paul fig would tell these stories of humiliation from his childhood, someone would inevitably ask how old were you when that happened, like twelve, and he would always reluctantly respond, um, seventeen. He was always like a little older than everyone assumed. But yeah, these stories cut so close to the bone. There was that plot line where Neil suspects that his dad's cheating and he finds a garage door clicker in his dad's car that doesn't open the family garage. So he bikes all over town, pointing the clicker different houses just to see which door it opens, and then he finally finds the right one and the stranger's garage door opens up and there's his dad's car inside. That was a real story from one of the writers, like he actually did that, which is heartbreaking. Yeah, that's that's such a I mean, that's like a that's like a John Cheever short story or something like. That's such a great image and yeah, oh yeah, his kid just by himself. It's Yeah, it's horrendous and the director Ken Kappas, who I later knew from all of his work on the Office. He's a regular director on the Office. He said, there was always a sort of low level depression just underneath these stories. And it's true, the goofiness of freaking gigs is always tempered by these truly devastating moments. And if that can go bad, I mean as much. Just I love Mash one of my favorite TV shows. Ever, sometimes that can get a little grading and it seem a little preachy, it can seem a little bit a little heavy handed. Yeah, that's the that's the bit about it. Did I send you the Futurama thing where they have the Aldabot that has a switch that goes between comic and Maudlin, But I don't. I don't sense that on this show at all. It's a really incredible blend. If it had gone on, he would have been ruined, just like everything. Um they decided explicitly that they were going to cast believable looking kids for the show, which, again, weirdly, the network was shockingly fine with UM as some of the notes that they started getting is really funny. Gabe Sacks, one of the writers, told The Guardian that they wanted to well. First of all, they wanted Franco to take off his shirt. They wanted James Franco to be shirtless and to see and they also pitched Britney Spears appearing is like a waitress, as like stunt casting. They were like, she's hot, right now, try and get her in the show. They're like, you people don't understand us. They did get Ben Stiller to appear as a favorite apatle in like I think the seventeenth episode, but by that time the show was already canceled, so it was kind of too little, too late. But believability was really the watchword for Paul all the way down to the dialogue and as he wrote in the show bible that he put together, which I think you can find online. I saw excerpts from it on Slate. Uh, he wrote, the show must be real. The teens in this series will talk like real teens. They will never be too clever or grown up sounding. We don't want a bunch of teenage Neil Simons spouting off wittally. These kids generally engage in teenage put downs. They overextend their language, as in, oh yeah, well, you're a a big idiot, that's what you are, and they never talk in that writers. Now I'm in my thirties and I now know what I'd say in that high school situation, so I'll give this kid a snappy comeback style of writing. These kids have to deal with each other with whatever is in the lexicon of a teenager and nothing more. And despite the fact that most of us think if I knew then what I know now, I'd be really cool and in control, the sad truth is that if we knew what we know now when we were in high school, we probably would get beaten up on a regular basis because the bullies don't respond well the clever put downs at their expense. The pree Sinking Show Bible is very entertaining. Look it up. Uh, they filmed the pilot at Ulysses S. Grant High School in l A. Which sounds that just and why did they do that? Why did they name somewhere in a side school in Los Angeles after a Civil War general? Anyway? Uh, probably the one of the most if not the I don't know, couldn't I couldn't find the superlative, but one of the most filmed locations in modern cinema, but the rest of the episodes were filmed in a meticulously recreated set thereof they had to do that partially because they had to avoid palm trees and old shots because this is supposed to be set in Michigan. Yeah. I looked up stuff that was shot at Grant High School and I quickly got overwhelmed euphoria. Of filmed a bit there, so did some of Clueless. I was used as the exterior for Safe by the Bell. The Office filmed a bit there, as well as the videos freggysaleas Fancy, which makes sense because it was a Clueless rip p didd He's all about the Benjamin's and the video for Weetas's deathless teenage dirt bag. So quite a history. But yeah, after the pilot got picked up, they built a T shaped hallway that stood in for the school and I don't know why I find this so great. Whenever the student extras walked past the camera, they had to just stand at the end of the hallway quietly because there's no work for them to go. They just like congregated back there. Uh. And the show Bible, which again Slate has online can look this up, lists all the stuff that Paul fig wanted going on in the background of the hallway to make it feel real, and his detail is just insane. He said. He wanted to see a punching contest between two friends, band kids selling candy bars, freak couples making out, janitors sweeping the hallway with red sawdust read small dust, kids carrying around their combs, some science fair projects, and girls coming up to a group of guys and telling them that one of the girls likes them. Is I love that the attention. It's like Truman Show level world building. Casting trivia dump. Sam Levine, who played Neal, told Vulture there's the way that the characters were written in the pilot before anyone was cast, and then that changed after Judd and Paul and the director Jake Caston cast all the child actors. They really really wrote to our strengths and it seemed a more authentic outcome. Emmy Award winning casting director Alison Jones was brought in for the show. In fact, the only Emmy this show one was for its casting on Piked Variety. We did tons of casting sessions. It was very apparent each time the right person would walk in. Some of them weren't exactly the way that they were written in the script. We decided, let's just rewrite the character. So we have John Francis Daily, who I mentioned was third Team when he auditioned, and uh he told Vanity Fair he was really sick. He said, I think that helped me ultimately because it let me put my guard down. I was just focused on not throwing up. He always on the show kind of looks a little launched, nauseous. Yeah, that's part of his brand, Uh, he haded to Vulture. He was kind of the odd man out because of his youth. I was fourteen and I was the only one who didn't have body hair. Ah. He was so young, or at the very least so sheltered that he still believed in Santa Claus when he was filming this show, and uh Seth Rogan gleefully disabused him of that notion. Uh Seth Rogan. He was talking to Vulture, and I don't even know what he was being interviewed for, but at some point he was like, I will ruin it for you if you still believe in Santa Claus. When John Francis Daily was filming Preaching Geeks, he let it slip that he like maybe sort of believed in Santa Claus and Rogan wrecked his world right then and there. That was was Rogan's point. Oh yeah, sweet boy, though a little dear head lights boy. Oh yeah. In a sense, that's very true to high school because everyone comes in at these different maturity levels where you do have kids and you know, still believe in Santa and then kids that you know are shaving and you know, look like they could be in their twenties. The mind's behind the show really at a hard time casting the Sam role because they didn't want to do the classic TV thing of casting an eighteen year old who look thirteen or fourteen. And Paul Figue said that John Francis Daily, I love this quote, had a glass head because you look into his eyes and you see everything that he's thinking and everything that he's going through. Yeah, those massive eyes. Yeah, that's so true for his crush slash girlfriend at whatever time on the show, Cindy the Cheerleader, they were considering a young Kayley Quoco. Is that weird? Yeah? Side note apparently in that episode where they watch a real the real porn, uh, they're actually watching a porn in that scene is that illegal? Can't you not show born too? You know what, that's a good point. I should look that up again. Uh. Linda Cardelini, who was then twenty three, was cast as the sixteen year old Lindsay Sam's older sister. Lindsay was the only character not based on somebody I knew. He told Vanity Fair, but Linda was the exact person I had in my head when she walked in. It was just like she's alive. Director Jake Caston, who also edited the show, told the magazine we used to say in editing that you could always cut to Linda and she'd be doing the right thing. It's nuts that the chemistry on this show was so good considering that she's like ten years older than the kid plan her brother. Like, that's so nuts, And like I think her the girl was playing her best friend Milly on the show, she was like fifteen in real life too, so that's again like almost ten years apart. And you know, it's one thing if it's like Greece where all the actors are in their late twenties and they're all kind of at the same level. But I mean the age range here is crazy, but they still have that camaraderie. I just think that's so impress us have in a group with the age spans so huge. Um Martin Star as Bill Hayr Chuck. When Martin Star came in, there was no question in my mind that he was Bill Feke told Vulture, he reminded me so much of the kid that I based the character on. Apatow said, I have to say, the first time I saw Martin on tape, I wasn't sure. It was the first time Martin Star had tested for anything, so that makes sense. And then I saw him in person and thought, this guy's incredible. It was really a creation, and Martin understood it. But I think he was doing a character more than anyone else. Yeah, if you see him interviewed like he definitely seems like a completely different person then, whereas the kid who plays Neil kind of seems like Neil uh Jake has in. The director added divanity, affair, the blank stare, and the way Martin is doing those affects, mouth hanging open. It's just this incredibly subtle, inspired comic character. We figured out how to write it and play to it, but it was not on the page initially, and it wasn't him playing himself either. He could make you cry laughing by doing almost thing. Then it turned out he could do anything. Um, this is just a funny detail. They they were allowed to use the gym at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, and Martin Starr started going every day with James Franco and uh like put on muscle weight and they were like, yeah, buddy, you you can't be buff for this role. You have to stop going to the gym so much. That's why they made him wear a robe in the locker room scenes. And they had a similar discussion with the well not kind of similar discussion with the women in the cast. In order to ensure that they look like real people, they suggested that they didn't lose any weight for the roles, and Busy Phillips recalled in her memoir that Judd Apatao took him aside and told them that they were quote perfect the way we were, and that he wanted to make sure we didn't feel any pressure to be thinned from anyone because that wasn't what they wanted, which I guess is a nice message to young actresses. Yeah, that's cute. Meanwhile, James Franco and Seth Rogan were apparently both on a strict vegan diet during then because Seth Rogan wanted to lose weight. That's so funny. Yeah, in that same gym interview, they were like, uh, Rogan wasn't going He was like no, Uh. Sam Levine is neo Schweiber. Sam Levin was sixteen when he was cast for this. He told Vanity Fair, my audition wasn't terribly good, but I had asked beforehand if I could do my William Shatner as part of it, which is terrible. That that's the point, and fig said. Levine looks past the camera to the casting director and goes, now, can I and then he goes into a William Shatner impression that was so corny and silly, and Judd's like, that's all of us when we were in high school, just trying to be funny, just doing stupid shi La Buff also read for that role. Uh. He said. He came in I think basically looking like his even Steven's character in like a Hawaiian shirt, like I think he was like really under the thrall of Cramer at the time, like out from Seinfeld as like as a oh Wow, go figure, can you do a shot there? No, yes, I can. I'm just not going to okay because she just punch in the rocket Man performance that he does, because that's really what I'd be doing as I mean, I'd be doing this the Family Guy Stewie, she's pretty flawless. It's just my it's my Paul one. Yeah. Not gonna be working on new little novel there. Uh yeah, man, that's that. I can't believe that show pulled that out, like pre Internet when you would have just no like I remember seeing that line being like, what the hell is this and then years being later being like, ah, it's a reference to a live performance. William Shatner did one set and award show they just made uninterrupted space on their primetime animated comedy to just reference that narrative to just a screeching halt for like ninety seconds. Anyway, Family Guy sidebar over James Frankie is Daniel de Sario. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given what we know about Franco in two which just google James Franco allegations get a quick read on that, people's memories of him on this show are checkered. Afatao said he seemed perfect to be a small town cool guy who wasn't as cool as he thought he was, which is a devastating put down of James Franco's entire being. Uh, when all the women in our office started talking about how gorgeous he was, Me and Feed just started laughing because we didn't see it. Yeah, and this Ay documentary I mentioned earlier about the show, Paul Figg says that he was kind of like, oh no, we don't want him on the show. I didn't know that he was hot. I just thought he was goofy looking. He looks like a lizard. There's this audition footage of James Franco reading for Nick Jason Siegel's character where he's like describing his huge drum kit and it's really kind of bad. Just five more pieces and I'll have more than It's not a very good audition. Yeah, Daily described Franco as all he's the one that had a Camu novel, heavily dog eared, and his car was so full of junk it looks like he lived out of it. I think the wardrobe woman that costumer talks about him coming in with a copy of The Carouac under his arm, just like fully being that guy. It's got to be a prop. I mean, I knew I knew so many people like that in school. And I also I went to n y U in the film department when Franco was going there for whatever program he was there for, and my friends would see him around, and Christie, my girlfriend, used to rent equipment out to him at the film center. And some people had his cell number because it was in the student database things, so they text him every time there was a party to see if he would come. He never responded. They probably dodged a bullet there. Levi le being called Franco a bit of a methodie, hothead type of actor. To page six, shouts to my old boss Lindsay Uh telling a story about filming a scene for the finale, during which Franco, who was fed up with what he felt was insufficient commitment from his fellow actors, called them all bad actors and stormed off the set, slamming a door so hard that it broke. Uh. Rogan told Vanity Fair James would do stuff at times just to push people's buttons. I think he threw milk in someone's face as an improv, and I remember thinking that's not the best improv that in seth Rogen's voice anyway. And then, of course there's Busy Phillips, who apparently originally auditioned for the role of Lindsay Linda Carlini's character. Uh. Linda and Busy actually go way back as classmates at Loyola Merrimount University, and Busy was initially hesitant about taking on the role of Kim Kelly because her agent told her to wait around for a bigger role, but it was Linda who actually persuaded her to do it. Busy said in an interview with The Huffington Post, She's the reason why I did Freaks and Geeks. Linda. I wasn't sure if I should do it because my just we're telling me I should hold out for a bigger part on another pilot. And then I ran into Linda at the airport. We were both picking up friends and taking them back to school, and she was like, I just got the part of Lindsay. You have to be Kim. It'll be so much fun. So that's a funny little you know, imagine if they hadn't run into each other at the airport. So many little like misconnections on the show are little moments that could have gone, could have gone the other way, all the way down to the time slot of the show. Oh God. Lauren Ambrose from Can't Hardly Wait was initially considered for the part of Lindsay, which I can kind of see. Name rings no bells to me? Did you ever see Can't Hardly Wait? She was did at the time, but all I can think of now is the and a few placements sung it, well, she's the one who wasn't. Yes, she's the redhead who isn't He stops saying general of Uh, moving on. Busy wrote her memoir Busy Phillips wrote her memoir This will only hurt a little that Franco, who was apparently angered by a moment which, mind you, was written in the script where her character shoves him, grabbed her by her arms and screamed in my face, don't ever touch me again, and shoved her to the ground. Uh. They have apparently talked it out since then, but still yeah. She later kind of explained that it was something sort of like a character choice, like he created this whole backstory that he didn't share with the rest of the cast. Uh, like that he came from a family that abused him or something so that he didn't want his girlfriend to ever like physically hit him. And Yeah, in this any documentary, both Franco and Busy Phillips play it off as like Franco being just, you know, Brando level method acting. But I got the vibe in her memoir that she thought that Franco was basically allowed to get away with all sorts of stuff because it was a boys club. M Yeah, I mean Seth Rogan, who has vowed to not work with James Franco again following all these accusations. He said to Vanity Fair that Busy scared me at first. She's just kind of intimidating. She's a little loud, and she's kind of physical. She'll punch you and smack you if she doesn't like what you did as an exclamation. So, I don't know, maybe he took that the wrong way. Yeah, Franco said that Busy was tougher than he was. Franco Seth Rogan as speaking Seth Rogan, Seth Rogan is Ken Miller. I was sixteen, Rogan told Washington Post, I would do stand up comedy and smoke a lot of weed and confront the very real fact that I was probably going to fail out of high school relatively soon. I got an agent through doing stand up comedy to try an audition for things, because it seemed like I would need a job one day and I was not going to get that through my academic path. Freaks and Geeks was the second audition, so he dropped out of high school and started doing the show, but and lied to the auction saying that he was doing corresponded school from Canada and instead he was writing super Bad Good for him time well spent. Seth's very self deprecating about his acting abilities at the time, and he later said, a lot of what people attribute to my character choices are just me not understanding what the hell I'm doing. I never acted in anything. Uh. Interestingly, Seth Rogan isn't the only cast member who wrote a screenplay while hanging out on the side of Freaks and Geeks. James Franco apparently took Martin Starr, the kid who played Bill the Tall Geek, under his wing. We mentioned earlier. They went to the studio gym together and worked out, and they apparently also wrote a script together, which is like Dark Universe Freaks and geeks. Martin Star told Vulture the script was about a queue who goes to school, kills a bunch of people, kills his girlfriend, then kills himself. Me and Franco would walk over to this twenty four hour coffee shop two blocks from me, and we'd write until two am. And then he tried to bequeath unto me his knowledge of life and women and everything else I was curious about. He clearly had a better handle on that than I did. We also talked about going the clubs and beating the hell out of people we deemed pricks. Maybe he was, maybe he was going along with what I felt, but I feel we both had a genuine hatred for what the popular culture was at the time. We were at a dark place apparently, and we sit and write this probably terrible script together while we were drunk. So that's troubling. Good Lord. Jason Siegel is Nick and opoulos. Nick was originally written as quote more of a gearhead car guy. I think he was even described as a fire plug, being told Variety, I think that's what he meant, fireplugs. Fire plug like a I guess I mean like a like a scrapper, like a like a roustabout or something. But when Siegel quote this big, tall, handsome guy with his interesting delivery and strange personality walked in, Apatow convinced fig to rewrite the part because of how good Seguel was in the audition. At the end of the day, Paul allows that letting Jason Segel walk away would have been a crime. In the documentary about the show, Segel explained that he and Franco were in the waiting room of the audition at the same time on the same day. Franco went in first, he went in second, and they both walked to their cars that day with the gig, which is adorable, And then he said he asked Franco how that he saw their chemistry on the show developing. He was like, yeah, you know, would like would I be the goofy one and you will be the cool one? And Franco just goes, yeah, that tracks. Yeah, It's really crazy. After weeks of auditions when they couldn't find the right kids, he had Jason Segel, James Franco, and apparently Linda Cardlini all came in on the same day talk about striking gold Man. I'm getting an astrologer on that one. Yeah, Joe Flaherty as Harold were when we first began. Director Brian Gordon told Vanity Fair Joe Flaherty was the star in everybody's mind. He was the SCTV hero. Siegel said, I just watched and learned doing scenes with him. He's so fast. There's a lot of improv on all this stuff we do with Judd. When you're young, you kind of think, I don't know if this old man can keep up, and then you're like, oh, this is the guy who created this style. And of course Dave gruber Allen, who plays Jeff Rosso the guidance counselor pulls out the guitar. Oh man, what a tremendous I love that guy. Though you never had a weird guidance counsel like that. Oh many. But I just for something, I guess. I haven't finished the series yet, but I I get, like me two vibes from him. It's just like every guidance counsel. They're all over Reachi, I had one to offer to explain divorce to me. Your parents are together, my parents are well. She was like, she just said that her name had changed, and and I guess confusion momentarily registered on my my name, and she was like, I'm getting divorced. Do you know what divorces? It was like, I'm fifteen, like I'm peripherally aware of the concept. Asked me what I wanted, like, you know, professionally, just in life, and I waxed poetic for several minutes on on the magic of creation and how like it it truly is like magic. Where there was once an empty page, there is now something that's capable of bringing joy to people and making them laugh or making them think, or making them feel something. And I went on and on and on, and then I was done, and he just kind of stared off in the space for a minute, and he looked at me and said, well, Jordan, you're setting yourself up to be a very poor, hungry man. Oh Jesus. Anyway, Dave Gruber Allen was maybe the most prepared for his role because he had actually just come off working in special ed. He was an education aid in Glendale, and he said, he told the Washington Post, he had substitutes taught in that same school district. So for me to have that dynamic with high school age kids was easy. I wonder if he pulled out the guitar. I assume cooled out the guitar as you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. And then of course there are the bit players. Man, they really stacked the bench with heavy hitters from some of the most nostalgia inducing movies of all time. You got the kid who played Squints in the sand Lot, Chauncey La Party. Uh, he is the bully in the show. You have Thomas F. Wilson a k A bit from Back to the Future as the gym teacher. Uh. Joe Flaherty Samon Lindsay's dad also had a bit part at the end the Back of the Future too as a Western Union man. It was Jason Schwartzman fresh office role and Rushmore which not technically a nostalgia movie, but I kind of count it. Uh, Shyla buff Rasheeda Jones, Ben Foster and small pre fame roles, as well as Ben Stiller, who we already mentioned who was already a star. And yeah, I mean really, the show couldn't help would be true to life since a lot of the casts were basically playing out their adolescence. In real time while they were working on this show, albeit you know, in an arrows twenty years prior. Avatel said, the show is the kid's entire life. It was their high school. They're literally going to school in the set. They're falling in love on the set. It's actually happening, and those relationships are still happening. They're still close. I know. The stuff about how the cast hung out the most heartwarming part of this to me. Early on, Judd held a cast meeting Flowery, Flowery, Flowery, Flowery fla leave all this in. This is the this is goal. This is when people come to this show for it. Early on, jud held a cast meeting Flayer. We told Vanity fair So stumble on past that it was something like, just cut every time he's in this story. It was something like, this is your chance right now as actors. But you have to concentrate on the show and don't get caught up in any of this Hollywood stuff. Don't start using drugs because we still have a show to do here. And to their credit, the kids apparently took that to heart. They would bond as a group. They would meet up in their free time to work on their material. Jason Segel told Vanity Fair, we would get the script on a Friday and Seth and James and I would get together at my house every Sunday without fail and do the scenes over and over and improve them and really think about them. We loved the show and we took the opportunity really, really seriously. Brogan added, we felt if we made the scenes better on the weekend, if we came in with better jokes, they would film it, and they would. And we didn't know it at the time, but that was completely unindicative of probably every other show that was on television. Um, given what we know about Apatao and Figg's work since then, it is not shocking that they encouraged improvising. Rogan told Vanity Fair he had us improvised and rewrote the scripts to what we improvised. We used to apatawis is great again. I don't think he likes James Franco, know, because we used to say two out of ten of Franco's improvs are good, but those two are just historic. Uh. Segel told The l A Times that Apatow helped encourage him to write for Getting Sarah Marshall by tapping into that spirit. There was a lot of improv on Freaks, he said, and he said to me, if you can improv like this, then you can write. Cardolini said. We used to go over to Jason's house. He would have everybody over. She's talking to TV Guide. We had lots of mutual friends, people doing shows that were near where we were. I was still in college and I lived with a bunch of college roommates, so we would have people over to our house too. I remember having people over for Christmas parties. It's really fun when you work with funny people because then you really are around some of the brightest, funniest minds, and sitting there cracking jokes with them is fun. Busy Phillips added in that same feature, we all got along and hung out, especially like the Freaks, Jason and Linda and Seth and me. We would go to Jason's apartment and hang out after work, or we go to Swingers and get breakfast burritos at like eleven at night. Oh, I do love that, you know. Yeah? And there were moments from the table read that we're ad lib that were then incorporated into the script. There's a scene where Lindsay's uptype friend Millie asks her if she knows what Busy Phillips's character gets up to in the yearbook Dark Room. Answer. Can't even say this with a straight face. She fornicates it. It was a typo in the script, but the actors playing her didn't know what fornicate means, so she delivered it the way it was written anywhere. And there's footage of this in that documentary I mentioned. The entire cast just dies when she says it, and Jason Siegel, is really cute, can see that she's confused why everyone's laughing, and he very sweetly leans over and clues her in, like, oh, there shouldn't be an it there, that's wrong, But you can see she still doesn't get it, and it's adorable. But yeah, that line made it into the script that typo. I worked with this rock camp for like elementary school kids once. I guess some of them were middle school and they wanted to do Californication and uh they I think we went through and took out like the limemout porn stars or something. But they were singing the chorus and the woman who ran the camp like pulled me out upset. She was like you can't have them say that. And I was like saying in an idiot. I was like, say what. She was like, fornication. It's in the chorus, and I was like, I don't think these kids know what that means. So then I had to explain it to them, which you can see them turning it over in their minds, like oh, And I was like, just make sure you're really enunciating it when you sing, so you're saying California cation like a vacation, and they it's just I was like, the damage has been done. Attention to it. Yeah, uh oh. The kid's dynamic would play out on the set in interesting ways and make it into the show. Daily and Cardelini would rib each other like they were real life brother and sister even when they weren't on camera. Yeah. Daily said in the Vanity Fair piece, I probably had a bit of a crush on her too, which you don't want to hear when you're playing brother and sister. But it's hard not to have a crush on Lynda Cardlia Yeah. And um, you know, he probably used some of that as fuel for his interactions with Jason Siegal because Jason Siegal and Linda Cardlini were actually dating. They dated for several years. Uh and when when he Forgetting Sarah Marshall came out, he was feeling questions about whether or not it was his breakup with Linda Cardlini that inspired that movie to the l a Times in two thousand eight and if on interview he said, I was still very much child then, and this was more of an amalgamation of a lot of different relationships and breakups that I've had. People are bound to talk, but Linda was a great girlfriend, which is so sweet. And then because of the trio of Daily and Starr and Levine, basically that two of them would pair off and hang out while the other one was unavailable, and then that would forge like resentments that always happens when someone's the odd person out in friendship, and that would inform their dynamic. Um and Dailey also told Vulture, any girl we got to do a scene with, we all fell in love with her at some point or another. I recall there being a lot of tension between the Geeks over the girls constantly. There was a girl both Martin and Sam liked, and I guess Sam said something to her that was embarrassing to Martin. So Martin resented Sam for certain things. Sam resented Martin for certain things. I resented them both for being able to drive. There were a lot of civil wars going on. I love that, oh man. I mean obviously, the chemistry of the cast is a crucial component of the show's success. But the secret ingredient, as you mentioned at the top of the episode, is trauma. Damn it. Yes, the willingness of the writers to plumb the depths of their souls to excavate the most painful childhood memories and humiliations. That's truly what made this show tick, and hopefully it was cathartic for them to share these stories because, as we talked about earlier, more often than not other people watching had similar tales of woe. Busy Phillips had a faux pitch for this show, and one of the interviews I thought was really funny. Tune in. Every week, we're gonna show you a version of events that you probably went through in high school. We're gonna help you laugh about it. You might catch some feelings about it, and at the end of the day, maybe it'll help us move on from the pain of high school, which Honestly, they should have just used that as like the ad pitch, maybe the show would have last the one season. Uh. Some of the best loved moments on the show were taken directly from the lives of the writers and creators. For Judd Apatow, the most poignant, and he says, the most personal scene that has ever done is the scene where Bill comes home from school and he's being raised by a single mom and he's basically a latchkey kid. He lets himself into the house, takes a few craft singles out of an otherwise empty fridge, and starts making a grilled cheese sandwich and he looks extremely lonely, and the Who's I'm One from Quadraphenia is playing in the background, with Pete Townsend singing more full lines like every year is the same and I feel it again, I'm a loser, no chance to win, and then the triumphant chorus kicks in just as Bill settles in in front of the TV and starts watching Gary Schandling doing stand up on The Dinah Shore Show, and he's just laughing away the pain and loneliness of being a kid, and also the pain of not having a dad. And Juttapata said this was very much his experience as a kid growing up in a divorced household, where these comedians more or less became his friends. I think he went on the work with Garry Shandling too. Uh. The funny thing about shooting this scene is that they got the kid playing Bill to laugh by having Judd Apatow and another writer's stand just behind the camera telling just incredibly dirty, aristocrat level dirty jokes. Uh. And I guess they did the same thing on the episode where Sam watches a porn and gets freaked out by sex, so he goes to his gym teacher, and the gym teacher takes him into his office and gives them what we can't hear but we imagine to be a very graphic lowdown and Uh. John Francis Daily's face just goes from bewilderment to laughter and back again over the course of ninety seconds. But the actor playing the gym teacher, Thomas F. Wilson, is just telling him dirty jokes all the time. They get these different facial responses. I thought it was because they didn't. He didn't get he didn't think Garry Shandling was funny. He was like, I'm supposed to be laughing this. Oh well, maybe that's part of it too, But yeah, another incident ripped from the personal lives of these poor creators. Uh. Paul Fiege admitted that the whole being freaked out by the mechanics of sex after seeing a poor and way too young thing was something that actually occurred in his life, and so did another scene showing the pain of being a late bloomer, the bit where the school's making kids take showers after gym class and Sam doesn't want to get naked in front of his friends at school, which I find to be a totally reasonable thing. I have no memory of people at my school using the showers after gym class. Really. Yeah. I also, I'm pretty sure I never broke a sweat and gym because I just stood there and I hope the ball never came to me. Um. I think I usually rigged it, so it was like the last class of the day for me too. But yeah, no, I don't remember that being a thing at my school, and an unusually smelly school, I guess. But yeah, Paul fig was forced to take a shower, and it was only marginally less traumatic than Sam getting locked out of the locker room naked. He told the a V. Club. But when I finally got forced to take a shower. When I finally went in, all the guys were playing soap hockey. They were all running around nude. It was the weirdest thing. And when they saw me, they knew I didn't want to take a shower, and they all tackled me. They all dog piled on top of me nude. It was the most traumatic thing I've ever been through in my life. We knew, really on we couldn't do that on the show because you'd be arrested for shooting a scene like that. So that's when it kind of morphed into a scene where when Sam finally does it, they make him run around nude. That was the TV acceptable version of what we could do. That's horrify Yeah, across the board. Yeah uh. Paul fig is also responsible for the opening of the Halloween episode. But the geeks are gathered around the kitchen table with all sorts of disgusting food items and a blender, and Bill says, I'll eat anything for ten dollars. Did you never do that in middle school? Dude? We had the disgusting contest all the time. You just take the garbage pizza and like you know, liquefied peaches, all that crap they're allowed to serve kids, and just like mash it into one thing and then just like try and get each other to eat it. I can't believe you never did that. I was never. No. I was more into like chocolate milk and mashed potatoes and like and then like grind it into a paste and be like, I eat this turkey piece. Just I guess I'm remembering very specific thanksgiving me open because it was usually grosser than that, like like a pixie sticks, like sprinkled sugar in there, and to make it even more disgusting, Oh god, yeah, then just send him running for the bathroom when they couldn't when they couldn't hold it down. How did you fare doing that? Or were you the ones I was or I made the concoction. I was never the person that eating it. Surely you know me better? Ye? Yes, yes, but I guess Paul fig Uh, much like John Francis Daily, he believed in Santa until he was fairly old, and the year that he found out that Santa wasn't real, he got so mad that he thought, Man, if it's dad, I'm gonna screw him over. I'm gonna leave him something other than milk. I'm gonna make him this terrible, toxic brew for my dad that will taste awful and make him throw up. And he's telling this story to the V club. So I started doing that stuff with a blender. I'm putting all this stuff in thinking it was really fun, and then I just started crying in the middle of it because it smelled so terrible, and I was like, what am I doing to my dad? So that was the origin of mixing in a bunch of crap into the planter, and then I mentioned this at the top of the episode. The final scene of the pilot, when Sam dances with his crush two Sticks, His cum sail away is based on a moment that occurred with jet Apataw when he delayed asking a girl to dance until the very day of said dance. Obviously, the lucky lady had a date at this point, but just like Cindy Anders in Freaking Geeks, Shopper to save Judd to dance, but unfortunately Judd waited until well after the slow song had already started to work up the courage to ask this girl to dance. He said. It was Human Nature by Michael Jackson. And you know, as I said, the only songs that are safe to dance too if you're socially in and actually can't dance are the slow songs. But by the time he actually got up to and asked for to dance, the song was over in like thirty seconds, and then they switched to something up tempo like Boogie Nights and he had to just go run for cover. As he later said, it was one of the most embarrassing moments in my high school career, and I was sad I didn't get to slow dance for the show. They were trying to get Stairway to Heaven, which I've personally been humiliated during that real bad I I told I've told this story several times in the show. I was more or less dumped on the dance floor because my dancing was so terrible. It happens, well, but they couldn't afford led Zeppelin, Uh so they were gonna go with Jay Giles Southside Shuff I don't really understand. But then they came up with com sail Away and after they submitted a personal request to Dennis De Young from sticks, but didn't they They did it with new I mean, we'll get to the music, but like, how many handwritten letters were they wheedling from these classic rock icons. This had like a like the little match Stick girl, just like chained to a desk, writing like please Billy Joel, can I use this at least? Yeah? I used this? Side three deep cut in this television show, feeds over cracking the whip, like now do Neil, now right, Dennis de Young put your tears into it. That's a fun bit, Okay, continuing the test. Oh yeah, this is great. There's at the end of the episode where Lindsay helps James Franco cheat and gets caught. She wants to tell the truth and admit it, and James Franco tells this heartfelt, sob story that wins her over about you know, you know what it's like being called dumb when you're eleven years old. It's really like and as I was watching this episode, I texted you in the middle of that scene, being like Jesus Christ, this show goes hard. And then when they're in the disciplinary committee meeting, he tells the identical sob story to the assembled crew of administrators, and Lindsay realizes that it's all an act and she's been conned, and she starts to laugh hysterically. And I texted you, oh, oh yeah. Franco's approach, this impassioned speech. It's I guess, based on something that Owen Wilson once did. I guess he told Judd atality gotten in trouble for something similar in high school. Maybe not high school, but at some point in school, and to get out of it, he just started to pretend to cry in the office. It's like really exaggerated sobbing took AOD way to diffuse people being mad at you. Yeah, hell yeah, I'm amazed. I never did that. I was never problem at any h. Tried it at home, kids and adults. Next time someone's Maddie, you just start weeping. Let's say we don't have any take on value for this show. Uh yeah, that's once this gets If this gets canceled, I'm pivoting to an influencer imag using capitalizing on the cloud. I have a masked giving people bad advice of the context of a pop culture podcast. The Kegar Next, Oh yeah, this is one of my favorite scenes. It's from the second episode where Lindsay and Sam's parents, the Weirds, go out of town and Lindsey lets the freaks throw a party at their house, but Sam and the geeks switch out the keg with non alcoholic beer. That's such a brilliant plot point. I thought it was surely just a goofy comedic premise, but apparently it's based on a real incident where the awesomey named writer on the show, j Elvis Weinstein, he switched the kegs at a party in high school because he basically wanted to make people look stupid. He told TV Guide, My idea was much more sort of a catcher in aw eyes sort of thing. And then everyone's a phony and we wanted to do this experiment where we entrapped them at a party, but enough people brought their own liquor that the experiment failed. And the funny thing is the qud who played Bill the Geek, Martin Starr, who you know, the guy was off writing snuff films. Yeah, working out the gym with him. Uh. He apparently arrived hours late to the shoot because he had been working on a short film with some usc film kids the night before. And been out partying even though he was like sixteen. Uh and this was the first episode that they were shooting after the pilot was picked up and Judd Apata was pissed. He was so mad that this kid was late that they threatened to replace him with the kid who played the geek guru Harris. He said it on the set. He said it to Daily and Levine. He was like, I hope you guys like acting with this other person. Jeta Apata does not come across especially well in a lot of those oral histories. He just sounds like he was saying having shouting matches all the time, and just like I think Fig says later on, he was a streamer. The beer they used in that scene was apparently cream soda, which all the kids had the pound and Lynda Cardelini later said afterwards, I was sick to my stomach. I don't think I've had a cream soda since I haven't had a cream soda in twenty years. Mm hmm. I love Linda Cardelini, as you said, impossible to impossible to not fall in love with her, all right, As we alluded to earlier, my favorite part of this the music the shows, but the music used to this nuts insane, just and and from the outset from Seagulls Characters, Rush, Obsession and Who's subsequently heart punching Lee depressing audition for a local band. That's the part I identified with the most to the scene in which he and Milly duet on Jesus is just all right with me? Uh? Fig Win in music baked into the show's d n a part of the bible that he prepared as the show's omnibus, included a list of bands with the note this is a freak band, this is a geek band, or this is a band they both would like. Let's do a little lightning around Jordan's Yes, you name a band and I'll see if I can get it in one of those three buckets. Okay, here we go, ready, Yeah, alright. This is from Paul Figg's show Bible. The categories are is it freaks? Is it geeks? Or is it freaks and geeks? Okay? Wings Paul McCartney and Wings, Oh, geeks and some freaks okay yeah, meat loaf mm hmm, both just geeks. That doesn't scam right, It seems pretty freaks to me. Yeah, you smoked weed? At any point in your life you have picked up that out of hell and been like this cover of rules. Check this out, genesis geeks. Although this is oh yeah, because I lied. This is Peter Gabriel ol. This is lamb lazed down on Broadway air as. This one's a tricky one, Fleetwood both I am sucking in this. It's geeks and freak girls. It specifies, Oh yeah, okay, sure, okay, let's say, oh, this one's easy. Bluish are called oh yeah, freaks, bluish are called shreds. This one okay, the police m uh freaks, that's it says, freaks and a few geeks, which surprised me. Eighty would have been like when did they really break seventy nine? I want to say, okay, so they were very new. Yeah, keep going, Jackson Brown. That's gotta be geeks and freaks who smoke a lot of pot. Oh yeah that tracks uh oh yeah, because police don't stand so close to me. Would have been was in September, so yeah, that they would have had geek appeal. Whatever, keep going, Bob seeger Oh freaks, geeks, some freaks. I challenge that that come gone, especially in Michigan. Yes, Elvis Costello. Oh, that's gotta be geeks, moody geeks, some freaks, geeks, nobody. When you're a teenager, especially whatever songs are your favorite songs become the soundtrack to your life. He told consequence formerly consequence of sound. When you just call it consequence, it sounds weird. Uh, So I knew I really wanted to make that an integral part, and wrote a lot of the cues into the actual script, some of which changed. Actually, long and short music was always going to be very integral to it, and always something that I wanted us to write into the script so we could mold scenes around the actual songs when possible. You know why it is we stop people stop getting interested in in new music. That's like basically the same reason that you um keep flashing your all your stress dreams are high school based, because like, your brain is so squirted full of chemicals throughout puberty that everything is just like imprinted in a way that you can never truly escape. And then as you get older, your brain develops and starts blocking mood swings generated by the amygdala, meaning you literally feel things less intensely. So that's why as you get older, if you're like, I don't like new music, it's because you are literally biologically incapable of caring about anything as much as you did when you were a teenagers that my dinner with entreight thing. Oh yeah, when I was twenty or whatever, all I cared about was art and music. Now I'm thirty six and all I think about his money. Yes. That. It's also my favorite tweet of all time, which is, um, it's a woman talking about a scene at a date, and it's the tweet is basically what I just said, which is like, And so as we get older, our prefrontal cortex develops and blocks mood swings generated by the amygdala, which makes it literally harder to feel about things the way we want did and then date. So you don't like your pa stuff me, I'm saying I don't like anything Greg anyway. Uh yeah, they spent like a like a third of the budget on this show is the music rights. Oh my god, yeah, probably more. I mean, this is another thing that set the show apart from other sitcoms. It was rare for network shows to have these classic songs in every single episode. And you know, in a sense, it's another one of the big things that linked it to the Wonder Years. It was really the last one that had so many hits in every episode, but even those that they were kind of used a bit more sparingly. They took a lot of inspiration from the cinema world to stuff by like how Ashby, like Harold and Maud where they use Cats Stevens and all the Scorsesey needle drops. And it's also been noted in a lot of music centric think pieces on freaking Geeks is a weird time in music. Music have basically splintered into subgenres disco, punk, new wave, and heavy metals, so the choices could be all over the place and they were all fit, so it gives them a lot of you know, unique styles. The theme of is Joan Jets Bad Reputation. But you know they almost went with Ted Nugent's Great White Buffalo because Paul like the opening guitar riff. Yeah, I mean that that also scans because New Jim was in Amboi Duke's right, so he was like a Michigan guy as well. Right, I don't think we've mentioned this, but it's set in Paul Figge's hometown, right, Like outside of like something Michigan suburb. I think it's a it's a fictitious town, I think, but it's supposed to be. Yeah yeah, um. Both fig and Apataw came by their love of music. Honestly. If he played guitar and drums growing up, and he saved up to buy himself a multi track task camme recorder that he used to make like parody songs and comedy skits in his basement, I didn't know this. Apata's grandfather was a record producer named Bobby Shadd who produced the first Janis Joplin record. Yeah, he was a big deal. He knows a lot about music, Jut Apataw. He once tweeted one of my Rolling Stone stories like it was really special. Yeah, that's great. I would love to talk to him about that. There's a great there's a great story of I think he told him, like Seth Meyers or something about how he I mean, he's like me when it comes to the Beatles, like you know, like most people when it comes to the Beatles, but he just worships them. And he met Paul McCartney at like some stage door after some show or something, and he's talking to him and they're actually like hitting it off and having a conversation, and Judd is so emboldened by how well things are going that I think he asks for Paul's number, and then Paul just recoils and puts his hand up like WHOA somebody took a picture, like some paparazzi or something took a picture of this moment, visibly recoiling shot Capital and then like when he's telling the story in seth Meyers, I like projected up on the screen. That's um. The kids, however, on the show, most of them were pretty out of step with all of this. Martin Star told Consequence. The first album he bought with his own money was Tupac Tupac's Tupac Tupac. Martin Star told Consequence the first album he bought with his own money was Tupac's All Eyes on Me. Busy Phillips name dropped bands like The Promise, Ring and Modest Mouse, Torrey Amos and Fiona Apple. Um But Daily John Francis Daily was in the Who's Tommy? When he was nine years old. He played Young Tommy in the national tour of the stage musical. Um Apatel said, my memory tells me that it was somewhat shocking how little many of them knew about led Zeppelin. UM and Paul f organized a class trip, a field trip for the kids to go see Ted Nugent at the House of Blues because he was like, this is what your characters are listening to. Um. Both of them are obsessive sticks fans, which I find very funny, like deep sticks, not just you know, not just first time I went to New Orleans, I got a cab driver who drove me to the airport coming back and he saw that my bag of records. He was like, oh, yeah, you like music. I was like, oh uh, he's first of all, not like a real cab, just like a dude in a car clearly work for some kind of livery service, just like overflowing ashtray of butts, and just like pops open the glove and pulls out of one of the spindle like a full spindle of burned live sticks bootlegs, And for the next five minutes just skipped around two different eras of live sticks, playing me sticks deep cuts. Are we talking like back prime era like late seventies, early eighties or these like seventies and and being like, oh Yeah, he's like roll right. Around two thousand five, they got this new drummer really gave him a shot in the arm, like you gotta check out this recording of all right, but you know where in New Orleans, right, Like not this kind of music anyway. Sam Levine told Consequence that he bragged to Apata and Fig that they wouldn't have to worry about his taste because he fancied himself a classic rock aficionado. Uh. And they parried by asking me if he knew about the record hocus Pocus by the Dutch prog rock band Focus, and he did not. Are you familiar with Are you familiar with Focus? It's in my dad's record collection of stuff he had in college that has not been removed from the milk heard that song, the one would they do the yodeling that goes into a flute breakdown, And to this day Levine said, I haven't returned his copy of Focus too. I have no idea where it might be, but I know I definitely never gave it back. Um. That kid actually also successfully lobbied for white Room by Cream to make it into an episode that already had two other Cream songs in it. It was perfect the episode of the kids are for us to take a shower in gym class, and the shower was just a big room of gleaming white tiles. Great neal drop. I mean, first time I heard that song was in the old iMac commercials. I don't remember that was in the for the white one. Yeah, I remember. She's a Rainbow by the Stones was the first time I heard that song. And they had all the colorful Imax. That was a great songs, a great ad, the little Ballet of Imax. Yeah, yeah, they had. I think they had a one for every different color, and the needle drops for more all different anyway. Music supervisor Buck Damon told Consequence that most of the classic rock bands they approached, we're pretty open to having their music used for the show, with the two big exceptions to that being led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. You asked led Zeppelin for anything, dream Page just holds out his hand, doesn't even make contact with you. Uh. They were in fact able to secure a first ever TV seek from Billy Joel for Rosalinda's eyes. I keep seeing that like sighted everywhere is like a big deal, Like that's not You're Billy Joe guy. Was it was it? Yeah, I don't know. It's not one of my favorites. I don't think it's a big song it is. I mean it's cool. Wasn't Vienna used in uh and cheers O Taxi? It was an episode of Taxi? That was what it was an equally great ensemble cast show. Okay, we'll get your together. Consequence I read that in your article. You do a little fact checking consequence of inaccuracy. More like it. That was a great piece. It was a good piece. Yeah. It's worth noting that music supervisors Buck Dammon and Amanda sheer Demi also worked on the epic soundtrack to Garden State as well as Meet Girls. I don't know where else to put this, but the scene where Jason Siegel's character Nick does his Saturday Night Fever style disco dance that was actually choreographed by the person who did the real John Travolta's dance on Saturday Night Fever. That's awesome. They just say they brought him out of well, I guess he probably wasn't retired. Um anyway, oh man. We mentioned earlier that apparently they wrote a lot of personal appeals to different musicians to get these songs secured, and they wanted to get Neil Young's Only Love Can Break Your Heart for the scene that's the scene where Bill confronts his dad. We sent it off for clearance. Jodd Apatel said, we heard that he watched it on the tour bus and that he gave us approval, and while we were editing the episode, we were canceled. So at that point we didn't know if the show would ever air, and it was an expensive que so I had to decide if I wanted to pay for it out of my own pocket. The studio said, we're not going to put a super expensive song in when you don't even have a network anymore. Several times in my life, I wake up with my heart racing thinking not paying for that song was one of the stupidest creative decisions I ever made. They ended up going with Dean Martin's You're Nobody Until Somebody Loves You, which is also equally tragic in that but admirably Aptel did not give up when the show came out on home media. He said, we asked New Young if we could put it in the show. When we got the deal to release it on DVD and he said, no, I don't know why. I literally was hunting down anybody who might know him. I was talking to personal trainers. I guess he was over us at that point. Lindsay's decision to become a Deadhead and follow the Bay and around the country was literally a spur of the moment decision made by apatown Fig after hearing mid season rumblings that their show was in trouble. I think they were at a Rodney danger Field stand up show in Vegas, if I'm remembering the anecdote correctly, and they were talking about how they might not have had a show. Uh, And so Apataw was like, yeah, you should film the season finale now to make sure that they had a satisfy ending for the show even if they didn't get the full season order. So the dead thing came more from Apataw, who remembered the kids disappearing from Long Island where he grew up for months at a time to follow the band, and then turning back up. Uh. And Fie grew up in I think I think he did grow up in Detroit, but he said he really only heard the Dead like on FM radio, like Sugar Magnolian and stuff, but he apparently listened to American Beauty over and over again while he was writing the finale great record. Uh. He round up really connecting with Box of Rain and Ripple, both of which the band gave their approval to use in the show Box of Rain song about Phil Lesh's dad dying. He told Sequence, I knew I wanted Box of Rain to be her Linda's epiphany song. And I remember when we showed the first cut of it to the writers, A couple of people in the writer's room were just laughing, like, oh my god, this is so cringe e watching this girl just start dancing to the album. And I was like, yeah, but we're all cringe at that age when you discover something, you just get into it more and more, which is true, right. God, thank god there's not footage of me being into bands and like visibly reacting the first time I heard Ransom or Tom Waits for that matter. Ornette Coleman, I have to stop myself from doing the Marvin Barry thing at every juncture, your cousin or Nett Barry. Um. They did, in fact, force Jason Siegel to learn how to play the drums. Look, he's a musical dude. I love his vampire Dracula he puts together and forgetting Sarah Marshall. Do you like that movie? I feel like that might hit some of yours. I saw it years ago. I feel weird about him because somebody once said that I reminded them of him, and so now whenever I see him, I just see things I don't like about myself. Oh, he's like universally beloved. Nobody has anything bad to say about Jason Segel anyway. Unfortunately, with such high profile music rights issues meant that many of the songs and freaks and geeks were not available in the international versions of the show. So they got composer Michael Andrews, yes, the Donnie Darko guy who did the show's original score, to do these temp replacement sound alike versions for the international releases. But since so much of the show was built around these specific songs, they didn't want to put it out on home media without the actual sinks that they intended. Apt told Consequence when we started getting offers to put it out, the problem was always like, but we can't pay for the music we're going to have to put out with those international sound cues, with the replacement songs, and I was like, Nope, we can't, we can't do it. Figue said, we just kept turning it down for four years. These things would pop up and it'd be like, Nope, we can't do it, not worth it, we don't want it. Good for them were sticking to their guns. That is incredible. Eventually, Shout Factory ponied up and released the show on DVD with the original music intact, as did Hulu when it the show arrived on the streamer before it was on DVD. We're like bootleg copies going on eBay for absurd amounts of money for fans, like hundreds of dollars. I didn't, I didn't see that, but that's scans they did. We will get into the fans of for the show water. Yeah, the fans shell that. But yeah, this was the same problem with The Wonder Years. That's why The Wonderers wasn't available on streaming for the longest time, and it wasn't available on DVD until quick reminder of the entertainment industry is making it up at all times. So I'm sure they were like streaming, how does the how does that work? Uh? DV home releases there's gonna be home if you're telling me there's gonna be a home. Media in the consequence interview, feed straight that he didn't want the sound or the look of the show to be reminiscent of that seventies show, the broad comedic hit at the time that he felt cherry picked kind of the most absurd things of the seventies. Yeah, the jokes were basically like, perms are funny, leisure suits are funny, and like I said at the top of the episode, that was sort of the reason why I never wanted to watch Freaks and Geeks in the first place. I thought it was a similar vibe about just like Stoner's being goofy and I hate that show, dude, I hate everyone who's involved in it. I don't understand except for Red anyway. He explained of the wardrobe they outfits they wore on that seventies show, We're definitely worn back then, but that wasn't what everybody wore, So it was very important to me with wardrobe. I got all my old yearbooks and I went through them and I said, here's how we dressed. We didn't all wear platform shoes and leisure suits and have our hair feathered with puuka shells, burnout, stressed in army clothes and jeans. It was more sixties oriented still to that end. Wardrobe designer Deborah McGuire, who also worked on Friends around the same time, thrifted everything for the show. Nothing on it was designer or bespoke. It was funny because I remember pulling the rack of vintage clothes with a fitting and thinking, these are the ugliest clothes I've ever seen in my life, she told the clothing website High snow By Itty Like. It was just ugly. She says. It was like the Midwest threw up. I hated it. That said, she said, the cast loved it. Each actor would come into their fitting and go, oh my god, I love this I wanted And that's when you realize there's so much about fashion and trends that is so psychological in terms of what you're used to, seeing what you've never seen, what looks fresh, and what looks new. These kids had never seen clothes that looked like this before. McGuire echoes the other cast and crew members reminiscences that Franco went above and beyond for his role. He flew to Paul Figge's hometown of Mount Clemens. There it is Michigan. To walk around and see what the houses look like, to see what the people were like, and to go to the thrift stores and what the clothing was like. He found pieces there that he thought would be interesting to bring back for the character. I think she mentioned that he had a copy of On the Road. I think you're right. Yeah. To achieve a unified look across the show's range of characters who occupied a broad strata of economic classes and cultural backgrounds, McGuire took an interesting tack. My idea was to overdie all of the wardrobe to give the whole piece a tone. Literally, every single piece of clothing went into an overde that was either gray or brown. Gross. She was also working on the show Friends at the time, which I find really hilarious. She said, I got the schizophrenic life going on. I got actors on Friends, you don't give a damn about you, And then you go over to the show Freaks and Geeks, where the kids are like sitting on your lap, hugging you and are so happy to see you. The energy was completely different. It was just such a wonderful place to be and it was inspiring all the time. M h. And then it all came crashing down. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information and just a moment. So after we talk about all the things that the show does well and how much of a fun time everyone had working on it, and so on and so forth. The sad end that everyone knew was coming, obviously was canceled not even halfway through. Anyway, A number of things conspired against it. It was a critical hit. It has an eight eight on Metacritic and a hundred percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Still garnered three Emmy nominations, one for casting. NBC debuted at eight pm on a Saturday, not a historically strong time slot. Yeah, this happen to be because a new network president or somebody hated the show and wanted to see a die on the vine, right, because no one programmed stuff on Saturday nights. It's dead air socially, a show that's meant for young people who would almost certainly be out with their friends on Saturday night. So yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, the Shenanigans hardly stopped there. There was a three week gap between episodes two and three because of the World Series, um baseball. Uh, I don't know if people not know about what the World Series are anyway. Yeah, So three consecutive weeks for that, and then was put on hold until early January, so not in November or December. Aired once in February, twice in March, and then canceled, and then the final two episodes aired in July. Six episodes were never aired from the original run. At one point they put it up against Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which is rude, nothing, He's gonna beat millionaire at that point, and then they just yeah, I just felt like a started to feel personal, you know, oh yeah, yeah, which is why years later Jet Aptl and the whole cast really like go either way to like name names when it and about the show died, they very much do. Who Was to a Millionaire was getting about eighteen million viewers an episode, and Freaks and Geeks getting I think at its peak seven million, and then it was just a slow drop off from there. Eventually it was the lowest rated show of the network, ultimately replaced by a game show, a reboot of the fifties show twenty one all. This is hilarious to me because that seven million figure would be considered a decent sized hit now for TV. Yeah yeah. Oh, and then the Mary and wrote a reunion show, which is an ABC made for TV movie sequel to the Mary title More show that ran opposite the tenth episode of Freaks and Geeks. Really the nail on the coffin. They're surely insulting, uh. In other words, they were off the air thirteen out of the twenty six weeks that it ran, and when it did run, the scheduling was so inconsistent that it was just it was to be unwatchable. Yeah, and I mean they didn't take it sitting down either. I mean they created a website that would tell people when Freaks and Geeks was airing. UM and NBC didn't want to share the u r L for it in in any of its ads. They were worried because they were worried about the Internet. Apotel told enemy they didn't want people to know the Internet existed. They were worried about losing viewers to it. The ratings for the first episode, like I said, we're okay. And at the next taping, Paul fi got up on a table in the cafeteria set and gathered everyone around and read out the ratings and was very proud. And then after that the numbers just nos dived and Joe Flaherty, the guy who plays the Weirds dad, later said, yeah, after that, Paul didn't gather everyone around and read the ratings anymore. He just took that as a sign, and jott Apothel told Vandity Fair, I thought, if we can't beat the tenth season of Cops, we don't deserve to be on the air. And then of course Cops kicked our ass. It's also worth noting that most of these episodes were aired out of sequence, which totally killed any sense of a linear narrative, and probably the most crucial example of this is the episode Kim Kelly Is My Friend, which actually wasn't aired originally, but it was a major turning point for Lindsay and Kim's relationship. Kim being Busy. Phillips's character Kim is in the first couple episodes horrible to basically everyone but especially Lindsay. But then Lindsay meets her family and discovers that she comes from really abusive household and they bought and the whole dynamic of their relationship changes. The audience sees her in a completely different light. They see why she is the way she is. The network just thought this episode was too intense, which, to be fair, it's a really intense bit of television. But without that episode, Kim is just mean. So you know, without airing sequentially, you wouldn't know why these characters are now relating completely differently with each other, and you won't get to see these characters in a way that help you relate to them and connect to them. And we mentioned the other dominant strain of teen oriented television at the time was stuff like Dawson's Creek, which came back to Bite Freaks and Geeks because incoming president at NBC was a guy named Garth ends Here who came from the w B and he told production that he had been to boarding school and Princeton and he quote didn't understand public school. Just let that sink in any documentary about the making of Freacing Geeks. I forget if it was Seth Rogan or Jason Siegel, but one of them, just because my name is Garth, Yeah, I mean that that that good Lord, that is grant me the Yeah you know, God grant me the confidence of a white man who would just stride into something, and announced that that was why he didn't he didn't get public school because of his background at boarding school in Princeton. Oh yeah, well, that's enough about him. The show's tone was not a fit to the dominant tone of high school shows at the time. Apatow told The Washington Post, we didn't get a ton of notes, but the spirit of the notes we did get was don't make it sad, don't make the kids suffer as much. Give the kids more victories, to which jud Apata would respond that this was a show about failing, but how you survive those failures and how your friends are always there for you when you fail. But there were some really classic notes, like one of them was, please revise ken and Amy's banter about a tuba being the only thing she can blow. And also, please take another pass at revisiting Bill's touching story about the time he quote tried to sneak out a fart but it came out of poop and I had to flush my undis down the toilet. I forget where I saw these. I think they're on the in the documentary they show like old inter network memos of notes from sensors and the network executives. They wanted to give more time to James Franco's character because you know, he obviously had heart throb potential, and they also wanted to throw in a few more happy endings. But as one of the producers is observed, have you ever seen a show that was failing suddenly turn it all around due to network executive notes? Yeah? Yeah. Consequently the battles intensified. Gabe Sex told The Guardian whoever was in charge at the time didn't quite understand what we were trying to do. They'd ask things like, when is Sam going to make out with a cheerleader? Uh, this is when the apatolog just kind of dug his heels in. Fig told Vanity Fair Judge was a screamer back then he would take them on hardcore. H But this all manifested in increasingly depressing ways. Uh. There's a pretty brutal I think a pretty brutal quote by Jason Siegel. He said, we didn't really have to be told we were being canceled. We watched the Craft Service table. It started out with like cold cuts and delicious snacks, and it was reduced to half a thing of creamer and some cornn pops by the end. Um sam Levine recalled that he said Judge phone would ring and he would walk twenty ft away and he'd be pacing on the phone for forty minutes, and I remember thinking that can't be a good phone call. Another telling signs when the cast reportedly got afloat in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade a few months after the show premiered, and no one knew who they were and they were just summarily booed by a crowd of New Yorkers. God, I guess their float was lame too. It was a giant watering can good job NBC promotional department. Apatow recalled saying, we were saying to the network, we need a full season, twenty two episodes to attract an audience, and the order wouldn't come, and I would just rant and rave. It was like begging your parents not to get divorced, trying to save the show. Yeah, considering his family history, it got pretty primal for him. His parents were divorced. He would later say, trying to keep the show together was basically his way of trying to keep his family together at all costs and all the depression and despair and rage that that brings um An episode this is that this is a great one. An episode in which Rogan's girlfriend explains to him that she has ambiguous genitalia, which is inspired by an episode of Howard Stern that Apatow had heard, became a big middle finger to NBC. Apatow said, like, now we're going to get really ambitious and aggressive with storylines that you would never approve of. The show had a chance of surviving. Ah yeah, this is really one of the only plot lines on the show that wasn't inspired by a personal anecdote from the writers. But despite all of these troubles, the show did garner devoted fans. Sam Levine told The Washington Post when NBC canceled the show, a group of fans pulled their money together but a two page add and variety telling NBC not to cancel the show. He said, I still can't believe they did this. These were regular people crowdfunding fifteen years before such a thing would become so commonplace online. Obviously, it didn't work, and the show got the ax of the eighteen episodes of Freaks and Geeks that were completed. The series was canceled after only twelve of them had aired. NBC broadcast three more of the episodes after a fan campaign, and the last were shown on the Fox Family Channel. The rat party for this was prom themed, which is so cute. Fig made everyone rent era appropriate tuxedos. Linda Carlini wore her mom's prom dress, Busy Phillips wore her own junior prom dress. They even had a mini graduation ceremony for Seth Rogan, who had dropped out of high school. M hm hm, this makes me want to cry. Uh Fie had rings made for him in Apatat with their names and Freaks and Geeks on them. I al still love that. Linda Carlini told Busy Phillips on an episode of her talk show that she soft stole her character's iconic army jacket. She said, I semi stole it because they didn't want me to take it. Then I sort of asked around, and because I'm too conscientious to be a shoplifter, so I asked around and then I took it and said, you know, if anybody ever needs this back, I guess when John apata got word that Freaksing Geeks was definitely get and canceled. Lenda CARLINI was about to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman to promote Freaks and Geeks, and this had always been a dream to appear on Letterman. So Apatow called her beforehand, apparently when she was in the limo on her way there, and broke the news, Oh yeah, the show is canceled. At her response, wait, Letterman's canceled. Good news and bad news, Linda, oh Man, this is the this is probably Oh yeah, this is this is You know how they say things get darkest before the dawn to the darkest. Uh Fi got the call that the show is canceled a few days after the unexpected death of his mother. Apatow recalled that underling calls and tells you the show is canceled. Then they say Garth is going to call it a little bit. They give you an hour to digest, so by the time he calls you, you don't really have the energy to argue. I always wondered if Garth had me on speakerphone with his underlings laughing as I cried and begged. Um san Levine said that the executive Scott Stasa actually called him. He said, I loved the show, but at the end of the day, it's a business. Seth Rogan tweeted in October the night before he had been in a room with Stassa and totally called him out on canceling the show. Um that NBC brass came to Paul Fieg's mom's funeral, he said, and then he said, and Judd got some secret joy of good. I'm glad they're all here. He made me laugh. He's enjoying the fact that they all had to come and see me in a diminished state. But in later years the cast did admit that it's brevity did give the show a kind of poignancy. It's just this little slice of life and the lives of these kids. And in the last episode pausing for spoilers, okay, Lindsay has to make a choice about attending an academic summit or following the Grateful Dead around for two weeks, and she opts to go with the dead, and this choice would have had a bad outcome for her in the plot of the show. If the series had continued, Judd apat was so season two would have found Lindsay quote having an extended acid trip while following the dead around and getting taken out of one of their shows on a stretcher while Queen's tire mother Down was playing. I don't really want to see that, so, you know, um, but since the series ended there with her getting in this you know, hippie van riding off into the sunset is beautiful little moment. It's this beautiful, idealistic teenage moment. And it goes back to that old Orson Wells quote, if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, where you stop your story, and Judd Apatow likens it to the end of the Graduate, which is sort of great example of that Orison Wells thing. It ends on the bus kind of nineties seconds after the happy ending. They made it on the bus. He's stolen a lane from the wedding from the guy she doesn't want to get married from. They've gotten the way with it, and then the camera just holds on them as they kind of realized, they just starts to fall, which is beauty full. Yeah. John Apatow kind of likened that to the end of Freaks and Geeks too. Um. Weirdly, John Apatow says that MTV offered to produce more episodes of Freaks and Geeks. They just had made their own teen drama TV series, Undressed, and they wanted to do something similar, but they offered a much lower budget, which would mean a smaller cast and a diminished soundtrack. So ultimately Apatow and the gang passed on the offer, declaring, we all decided we didn't want to do a weaker version of the show and uh. In an interview with e W at the premiere of the Freaks and Geeks documentary, Paul Fieg revealed, I've been saying for fifteen years, I so want to do the Freaks and Geeks musical. I just got to write the book for it. But I think it will happen one day because it's just sitting there waiting to be done. That's cool. When John Francis Daily was directing the reboot of National Lampoon's Vacation, Yes, he directed that with Ed Helms. He originally had a plan to have Neil and Bill make cameos as drugged up attendees of a burning Man type festival, but I think it was shot, but it was ultimately cut. It would have been an incredible union of all three Geeks from Freaks and Geeks because I guess John had a small role in that movie too, but alas it was not to be. Yeah, and this is another thing, another incredibly heartwarming bit. I just man, I came away from this really liking both Jedda, hating Franco, and liking Jed apatown Paul Fiege a lot more. Appadel was so upset during the post production phase of the rest of the show that he herniated a disk. How clenching at the editing bag. He spent the next phase of his career basically attempting to pay this young his his cast back, or I guess pay them forward, um, keep together? Yeah. Yeah. He fought with the network to include Freaks and Geeks actors in his next show, which is the half hour college comedy Undeclared for Fox, but the network only picked up Rogan Segel Jason Segel to become a recurring character, and Samuelvine and Busy Phillips, among others from Freaking Geeks also guest Starret and then Siegel told The La Times that interview there was a character called Jason in the forty year old virgin and Judd said, I've written this for you, and Siegel says, I could not have been more excited. I hadn't worked in a while, but he couldn't get me approved. I wasn't famous enough. That was my low point. But it came back around for him because he didn't even have to audition for his role, his long running role on How I Met Your Mother because the creators were fans of freaks and geeks, and I think they've put a bunch of easter eggs for freaksing geeks into How I Met your Mother. And even then after you got that, Apatel didn't stop advocating for him. Uh. He has a bit part and Knocked Up, and Apatel helped him get forgetting Sarah Marshall Greenlit at Universal. And then Siegel tells this great anecdote, says, we were on a plane, Judd and I and he leaned out and let out a deliberate exhale, like you could tell joke was about to come. He said, I finally got you a lead in a movie. Now I can sleep. Seth Rogan said, it's part of me thinks the only reason I was in Knocked Up in four year old virgin Is, so Judd can like prove some NBC executive wrong, which is totally okay with me. You said that in documentary. It doesn't diminish it. In my eye. I'm totally okay to have a career that's based on vengeance and rage. Yeah. Jason Segel later joked to him on some panel, A lot of us have no higher education because of you, Judd. I guess Jason Segel skipped out on applying for college when he was cast on Freaks and Geeks. And I've read the both Busy Phillips and Lyndon CARDLINI dropped that college, and Seth As we talked about, dropped that high school. But it seemed to work out okay for all of them. It's truly insane the number of movies and TV shows that have inadvertently spun off of Freaks and Geeks. And Paul Fegas said that he looks to them as you know, they're successful children. Uh, it's just a dizzying family tree that spans Spiderman to the Office, Two Girls, Two Mad Men, to How I Met Your Mother, to Forget Sarah Marshall, Super Bad, Pineapple Express, Silicon Valley, forty Old Virgin Anchor, Man Bad Teacher, Knocked Up, Arrest of Development, Bride'smaids, The Vacation, and Ghostbuster's reboot, Blaze of Glory. So many incredible movies. Well, well, so many movies. A couple of good ones in there. Uh. Paul Fig wrote a piece for Vanity Fair where he talked about what each character would have gone on to do in the second season of Freaks and Geeks and beyond the second season, we should run down their potential futures. Now, Lindsay we talked about having an acid freak out at a dead show, and the rest of the series, or at least the second season, showed Lindsay totally losing the trust of her family. We wanted to show a parents in the eighties dealt with their kids who were really badly on drugs. He said, that was something we talked about. But I guess she has a happy ending. Paul Fig says that she would have ended up at some point in her twenties and Greenwich Village as a performance artist, and after that she probably would have become a human rights lawyer. That's nice. Yeah, Sam would have ended up in the drama club because Paul Fig said, that was my experience in school, and that was the character that was most closely based on himself. He said that bummed me out the most not getting to play that story out. There may have also been some plots around Sam growing tall, because in real life John Francis daily grew something like a foot in the year following the show's cancelation. Uh. Sam apparently also would have run against his ex, the cheerleader Cindy Sanders, for student body president, and jud Apatow said that he hoped Cindy Sanders and Sam Weir would have gone on to become mortal enemies, which I love. Neil would have been in a swing choir that rules hull. Fig said, I just thought he would really blossom in there and think he would kind of be the king of the school. Yeah, that's what you think about kids here and swing choir. We figured to give me his outlet while his parents were going through a really horrible divorce. Uh. And for Daniel James Franco's care, Paul Fig said that they always liked the idea that Daniel would probably end up in jail Lamb probably not. Franco weren't rich, He'd be in some legal troubles. Uh Uh. Bill the tall Geek. Actor Martin Starr said, because of the decisions I was making off camera, they had plans to gear Bill towards becoming a jock. In the second season. We mentioned him going to the gym in real life with Franco and getting cut up off. They kind of talked about the potential splitting us up as a threesome and the Geeks parting ways to some degree and me fitting in with a different crowd, which is actually a really good plot point because that's something that happens with friend groups in school. Uh. Paul fig adds he turned out to be good at basketball and started to get into it so that he was getting pulled a little more over to the jock side, which would create an odd little rift with him and the other Geeks in a sort of fitting aside his single mom, Mary's coach, Frederick's the gym teacher, so kind of fits him moving into the more of the jock direction. Uh. Paul Figs said that he wanted Kim Kelly to be pregnant, but it wasn't necessarily going to be her again off again boyfriend Daniels. I thought this actually happened when she was out on the road with Lindsley following the dead. Uh. For Nick Jason Segel's character, we were kind of moving Nick towards having to go into the army because of his badass dad. Is that's not a badasses Dad's scary? Does his dad get any better? No? His dad's a print. Okay, good because that was a real option for so many people in my school. But he would be desperately trying to avoid it. And then Uh, Ken Seth Rogan's character, fig says, we always liked that we had set up that he had rich parents. But Ken's such an enigma. I think he's the guy that just kind of hangs around town. We like to surprise people with Ken's character. What was the thing you'd least expect he would do or place he'd come from. I can completely see us loading him up with a lot of weird stuff, and I was sad we never got to show his parents and God only knows who we would have had him dating. Yeah, he was always my favorite character on the show. I had to say, all these future plans for these characters are kind of terrible. Wait, your favorite character, Seth Rogan yeah, who's your Jason Segel Siege thing? I know, I know, but I mean, just like the character wise, I feel like, can whatever. You don't need to relitigate this. We're into the twenty four pages. Well, we're on the home stretch. That's true, that's true. Um. Yeah, they're not great. They're not They're not really that good now that I think about it. I mean, it's interesting when you do think about the points that he's making, like teen pregnancy and drugs were such a big thing through the eighties. But I don't know, there's different show. Yeah, but there's also like some like why would he treat Lindsay like that? Man? Like I thought of opening like season twoh they're getting carried out of a dead concert at Yeah, um yeah, I just we found it. I found a couple of quotes too that I really like that illustrate the show. I mean, some of it is just the kids talking about how much fun they had, Like Jason Segel told NPR and two thousand nine, that was one of the best times in my life. We were all so young, and we were so naive that we kind of thought every experience would be like that, and it isn't every experience isn't like that. It was a really beautiful, beautiful time. Martin Starr was saying, trying to pin down the appeal of the show, and I think he got really close to it. He says, it doesn't pander, it's honest from the beginning, and I think everybody that brought it to life did it in such an honest way. Um, and continued, I can't express how fortunate I feel to have been a part of something so appreciated and so loved. I feel so fortunate that it's something I care so much about and that I can connect with people that connect with it. I got really, really lucky. I mentioned at the top of the episode that I it's a cliche, but I think the thing that I love about this show the most is um that it has heart, and not in a kind of cheesy, sit come a way that like other shows that I said to have heart, do you know heart's hurt. Having heart hurts a lot. It's x to be a team for most people, and Freaksing Geeks honors that in a really beautiful, bitter, sweet way. Um. And that's why it's stuck around. That's why it continues to resonate with so many people, and I mean, we're really fortunate that it is out there and it's pretty unaltered form. I mean, just having all the music in it and learning about all the struggles that they went to have it, you know, not being aired and having the season chopped up. It really is something that gets to live the way that it was always intended to. And that's just a nice little narrative you don't really ever see in the entertainment world. Hearts hurt a lot. That's an all time sentiment for this podcast. That's a great line. I don't think I could say it any better. Judd Apato talks about how this show still makes some cry, or at least parts of it, because it's kids reaching out and that's so hard to do at any age, but especially at that age. To offer your heart. It's a beautiful thing, and I think it's a beautiful note to end on. For those of you listening, We've both hope that you find your own big, gigantic drum kit out there, whatever it may be. Thanks for listening, everyone, This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Runt Talk. We'll catch you next Time, Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum on the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcast on iHeart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.