Freaks and Geeks

Freaks and Geeks is an odd hybrid of a show – a heavily comedic high-school series that nonetheless has 45-minute episodes and a heavy enough focus on drama and character development that you can't really straightforwardly call it a “comedy”, but it's also much more laconic than your typical drama – things simply happen slowly on this show, with not a lot of structural zip. It sits at a crossroads of a few things, in other words, but how appropriate is that for a show about crossing boundaries and unifying disparate groups?

That's the thesis of Freaks and Geeks, if it has one – that different cliques and groups may have good, human reasons for being separated from each other, but that they would ultimately all benefit from some mutual understanding and learning to appreciate each other. Which sounds like a horribly dull Breakfast Club kind of theme to take away from the whole show, but the advantage of being a TV show as opposed to a movie is that you have time to be nuanced in that view. What does it mean to make a group of new friends? Why would you abandon an old clique? What happens when those two lives collide?

That's what the series explores over its unusual running time (18 episodes falls exactly between a 13-episode and a 22-episode order – both are normal, but this show, as is typical, falls somewhere in the middle) with the two Weir siblings – Lindsay, mostly a Freak, and Sam, mostly a Geek. And the most well-done aspect of the show is how it spirals out from these two characters to their surrounding social circles, the familial and romantic lives of their friends, to the point that at the end of the first season there's no main character without a substantial amount of development, entirely distinct from every other main character.

This lets Freaks and Geeks be very sneaky and unexpectedly brutal with its emotional moments. It is, like I said, a laconic show – there's very little soundtrack except for the many, many licensed classic rock tunes the characters jam out to, so there's not a shorthand for how you're supposed to feel at any given moment, and the show is edited pretty slowly. But when it sets up a truly awkward, humiliating, or emotional situation, that just means it simmers and burns that much longer.

There's a tendency I've noticed for shows that have been canceled too soon for fans to rationalize that it didn't need to say anything more than it did. I mostly reject this – I've been aware of Firefly's cancellation for far too long to be sore that it was cut short, but it absolutely did need to be longer than it ended up being. Freaks and Geeks, though? I'm more or less okay with it being just 18 episodes. You can see, over this season, the show setting up an approach, a worldview, and a set of characters that could have been followed for years, and you can also just about guess how it could develop and end up. And, God, it would have been so satisfying and great to see it.

But, you know what? It already feels like a treat to have a show with this approach – one like The Breakfast Club or Dazed and Confused that looks well and honestly at high school, but as a television series so that it has time to decompress and tell more stories in a longer form about the whole damn experience. From the very first moment it feels like stolen time. This is a show that definitely deserved to go on longer, but said what it had to say loudly and proudly enough that it didn't really need to.