"I am not a little girl. I'm a Bionic Woman." - Martin Starr as Bill Haverchuck explaining his Halloween costume
Freaks and Geeks: Deluxe Collector's Edition DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
I have a love/hate relationship with TV. With its recurring characters and its large volume of episodes per season, television is able to give us the sensation of becoming immersed in another world more effectively than other entertainment mediums can. It effectively gives us the illusion of really knowing the characters in a way that a two hour film cannot. It has produced classics that will live forever and some abysmal failures that are better left forgotten. But it has one big problem. TV shows essentially exist to sell dish soap, cars, and other consumer products. The quality of a show doesn't count as much as the quantity of viewers the show attracts. For every high-caliber show that manages to run for a respectable number of years (like, say, The Mary Tyler Moore Show), there are probably five or six worthy shows that are cancelled prematurely when they fail to attract enough viewers. The brilliant Freaks and Geeks can be added to that latter category.
Set in 1980 Michigan, Freaks and Geeks follows two groups of students at McKinley High School: the druggy slackers (the freaks) and the nerdy runts (the geeks). Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini, who went on to ER and the Scooby-Doo films) is a sixteen year old brainiac (she used to be on the school's competitive math team, the "mathletes") who decides to abandon her safe, predictable life as a star pupil in favor of running with the underachieving freak crowd: pothead drum nut Nick (Jason Segel), brooding punk Daniel (Spider-Man's James Franco), sardonic Ken (Seth Rogen), and hothead Kim (Busy Philipps). Also looking beyond their social class are Lindsay's younger brother, Sam (John Francis Daley), and his geek friends Neal (Samm Levine) and Bill (Martin Starr). They have set their sights impossibly high, though - Sam has a hopeless crush on Cindy Sanders (Natasha Melnick), a cheerleader. Providing guidance to Lindsay and Sam are their parents, Harold and Jean Weir (played by SCTV's Joe Flaherty and Broadway actress Becky Ann Baker).
Freaks and Geeks is not your typical high school TV show. This anti-90210 doesn't feature model-perfect actors pretending to be miserable while grappling with problems that most normal teens would kill to have. No, Freaks and Geeks presents teens in their awkward, gangly, flatulent glory. As in real life, some of the school's fifteen year-old students could pass for thirty five while others look seven, tops. On 90210, having to drive last year's BMW to school would be a cause for concern, while Freaks focuses on the subtle humiliations of school life, as when even the fat kid who can't waddle three feet without wheezing gets picked for a team in P.E. before you do.
Like My So-Called Life before it, Freaks is able to successfully portray the misguided seriousness of teen years. This combination of ignorance and earnestness is often a source of humor on the show, as when a solemn Lindsay reminds a spectacularly untalented Nick that he was "the one who told me when I first met you that drums are your reason for living, and I don't think you should let anyone talk you out of that." The series never makes fun of its characters. Instead, it celebrates that period when our bodies have matured but our minds have not quite caught up.
Each episode is filled with laugh-inducing moments. Daniel attempting to "tutor" Sam by giving him a porn film. Nick courting Lindsay with an illiterate mash note and an off-key rendition of Styx's "Lady." Mrs. Weir responding to a dirty joke with "You know who's funny? That Red Buttons." Someone writing a book report on Al Jaffee's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. One funny recurring gag involves the school's guidance counselor, Mr. Rosso (Dave "Gruber" Allen), a burnout '60s throwback who often relates horribly inappropriate stories to his young charges: to illustrate his point about maintaining a sense of pride, he tells the story of the time when a group of rednecks in a bar called him "a woman" and "dragged me into an alley, made me dance, told me to bark like a dog."
Yet the series is also capable of packing an emotional punch. At the end of "Girlfriends and Boyfriends," Sam listens to Cindy on the other end of the phone detailing her boyfriend woes, resigned to being simply her friend. It is a simple but touching moment. (Also included as an extra is the thankfully unused original ending which plays the same scene for much cheaper laughs.) Neal's quest in "The Garage Door" to find his father's mistress using a garage door opener found in his father's car is both breathtaking and heartbreaking. In that same episode, an Atari video game system leads to a surprisingly tearful moment. How many times can you say that an Atari brought you to tears?
The moments described above are successful, in part, because of the show's high quality writing. Indeed, its scripts are much more nuanced than most other TV series. What makes them memorable, though, is the stellar cast. Cardellini's performance, for example, is incredibly rich. She perfectly captures Lindsay's ongoing struggle to fit in somewhere, ANYWHERE. Her Lindsay yearns to rebel, but isn't sure what to rebel against. It hardly seems fair to focus on specific performances since the entire cast is so strong. Daley, Levine, Starr, Segel, Rogen, Philipps, and the rest of the cast are all terrific in their own right, but they are also able to mesh together perfectly. The level of work produced by this cast as a whole could be used as an effective argument in favor of creating a "Best Ensemble Cast" Emmy award.
The series is also meticulously produced. The sets perfectly capture the period without relying on cheap kitsch. The costumes are so painfully of-their-time that one look at their unnatural fibers and stiff textures can cause one to itch. The show's music is also important in creating the tone for the series. Much has been made of the fact that the producers of the DVD went to great lengths to secure the rights to all of the period-correct music used in the series. Securing these rights can be an expensive, time consuming process, and some companies choose to simply replace all of a show's pop music with generic instrumentals, a move with sometimes disastrous results. The producers of Freaks and Geeks wisely understood that the show's songs (by performers as diverse as The Who, Mac Davis, Queen, Styx, Dean Martin, Bob Seger, Black Flag, and Gene Krupa) are too integral to the series to simply be replaced by music that wouldn't even be welcome in an elevator. What most people overlook, however, is that the show's original music - the stuff composed by Mike Andrews expressly for the show. This incidental music is just as important to the series' style as the songs by Boston, Van Halen, and the other famous bands on the soundtrack.
Alas, in the fall of 1999 NBC dumped this gem of a show into its Saturday night lineup. Saturday night used to be TV's prestige night, hosting such shows as All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Those days, however, are long gone. It is now one of the lowest rated nights of the week, which explains the seemingly never-ending run of Cops. The show premiered to decent ratings, dropped in its second week, and was then yanked off of the air due to the World Series. After a few more low-rated Saturday night runs, NBC re-launched the series on Monday nights in the winter of 2000. The show was often preempted and failed to ignite in the ratings. NBC cancelled the series with five episodes left to air. That summer, the network burned off three of the remaining episodes on a Saturday night. The other two episodes had their premiere on the Fox Family Channel in the fall of 2000.
The disc menus feature publicity stills and production photos. The series' fun original score provides musical accompaniment. Navigation is simple and intuitive. Viewers can choose to play all of the episodes on the disc or can choose an individual one. The episodes are divided into chapters.
The Freaks and Geeks DVDs are available in two versions. The standard version is a six disc set housed in typical DVD packaging. This set contains all of the episodes and a bunch of extras (see below). It is available in stores and from online retailers like Amazon. The creators have also put out a deluxe version aimed at fans. Available only at www.freaksandgeeks.com, this deluxe edition contains the same six discs as the standard version, but includes two additional DVDs packed with even more extras (see below). The deluxe edition also features stunning limited edition packaging designed to mimic a full-sized McKinley High 1980-81 yearbook, complete with faux leatherette cover and embossed class seal. Eighty full-color, high gloss pages are devoted to behind-the scenes photos, messages from the producers, tributes to fans, magazine articles about the show, and a full episode guide. The discs themselves slide into padded safety sleeves and are held in place by four heavy cardboard pages at the back of the yearbook. This packaging was produced with amazing attention to detail, down to inscriptions by each of the show's characters.
For more details on the cost of the sets versus the contents, please see the end of the "Extras" section below.
