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January 20, 2004
TT: Truth or consequences
I do so love a nice ripe grassy-knoll theory.Once Cinetrix catches a whiff of her smelling salts, she'll be pleased to hear the latest DVD release info, courtesy of DVD Journal. Out today, as regular readers of this blog already know, is The Rules of the Game, the greatest movie ever made, on DVD at last. I'll be writing about it as soon as my copy arrives.
In the nonce, here's a snippet of news guaranteed to give Our Girl fits de joie:
Finally, the cult favorite TV series Freaks and Geeks is about to go digital, thanks to new DVD vendor Shout! Factory and DreamWorks Television. The six-disc set of the first (and only) season will include all 18 episodes, including three that never aired, and we are assured that some complicated music-licensing issues have been smoothed out (congrats to fans, by the way, who compiled nearly 40,000 online signatures to make this release a reality). Expect a "director's cut" of the pilot episode, deleted scenes, outtakes, and -- get this -- 28 commentary tracks from practically everybody ever associated with the series. Geek out on April 6.
As it happens, I wrote about Freaks and Geeks for the New York Times a few years ago. Here's the piece.
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Old sitcoms never die--they just move to cable, where they surface at odd intervals forevermore. The nice thing about this two-tiered system of programming is that it occasionally allows those of us who don't live on the cutting edge of popular culture to catch up with how the hipper half lives. So I paid attention when my friend Laura, a graduate student who specializes in Victorian literature but also keeps close tabs on the doings of people like P.J. Harvey and Conan O'Brian, called to tell me that the Fox Family Channel was rerunning two episodes of "Freaks and Geeks" back to back every Tuesday night at eight and nine, and that I absolutely had to tune in.
"Freaks and Geeks" is an hour-long comedy about life among the less popular students of a Michigan high school circa 1980. Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, it debuted on NBC in the fall of 1999. The critics loved it, the public ignored it, and the show was scuttled midway through its first season, with three episodes still waiting to be broadcast (they have since aired on Fox, and Feig and Apatow have gone on to create "Undeclared," a new college comedy scheduled to debut on the main Fox network this fall). I never saw it, but Laura assured me that not only was it a great show, it was also eerily true to life. "That was exactly what it was like for me back then," she said.
I tuned in, fell in love, told all my other friends how good it was, and promptly discovered that just about everyone I know who was going to high school in 1980 loved "Freaks and Geeks," too, and that their lives had also been exactly like that. Fortunately, you don't have to be under 40 to appreciate the show's sharp-eyed social humor. Most of the character types will be perfectly recognizable to viewers who, like me, attended high school in the ‘70s. I even had a social-studies teacher who, just like Mr. Rosso, the show's long-haired, herpes-infected guidance counselor, discreetly introduced his students to the Grateful Dead.
At the center of "Freaks and Geeks" is Lindsay Weir, an overachieving 16-year-old (played exquisitely well by Linda Cardellini) who one day crashes into the wall of adolescent alienation, dons her father's old Army jacket, and takes up with Daniel, Kim, Nick, and Ken, a quartet of slightly older underachievers who have banded together to smoke dope and sneer at the popular kids of McKinley High School. Once we get to know the freaks better, we realize that the rejection is mutual: Daniel, their leader, is a working-class troublemaker who gets bad grades not because he doesn't care but because he isn't quite bright enough to do better. Were he a little less daring and a little less cute, he might even find himself consigned to the same circle of high-school hell as Lindsay's younger brother Sam and his geeky friends Neal and Bill, who play "Dungeons and Dragons" and always get picked last in gym class.
The most believable thing about this utterly believable show is that virtually every episode is made to pivot on an experience intrinsic to teenage life: embarrassment. Things rarely go right for Lindsay, Sam, and their friends, at least not for long, and the things that go wrong are often as pathetic as they are amusing. Nick, a hamfisted garage-band drummer who idolizes Led Zeppelin's John Bonham, auditions for a local rock group and proves to be not nearly good enough to pass muster; Neal longs to be a stand-up comedian, but can't make anyone laugh; Bill's mother starts dating the gym teacher who torments him daily. Moreover, the story lines on "Freaks and Geeks" are rarely wrapped up in neat, reassuring packages, and even when everybody manages to get through an episode with a modicum of pride intact, it's a safe bet that further embarrassment is on the way....
"Freaks and Geeks" is agonizingly true to life, far more so than those overcooked programs known in the industry as "reality TV." (Humankind cannot bear very much real reality.) I have no doubt that this is why it failed in its original network run. Most Americans don't watch TV to see life as it is. They get enough of that at home. Nowadays, the most popular shows are about pretty people who have lots of great sex. For these fortunate folk, failure is that which immediately precedes success, a temporary condition existing solely to "humanize" them, thus permitting the rest of us poor slobs to identify more easily with their on-screen adventures. That's why Hollywood stars get paid the big bucks: we can't look like them, but they can act like us.
Ours is a soft-mouthed culture, for which reason we also don't much care for European-style farce, the cruel comedy that arises from the systematic and relentless humiliation of ordinary people. "Fawlty Towers," John Cleese's classic sitcom about the henpecked owner of a rundown English hotel, could never have been shown on American network TV because Basil Fawlty never, ever comes out on top: no matter how outrageously he behaves, his wife and guests invariably contrive to reduce him to cringing servility. (The phrase most frequently uttered by Basil is "Thank you so very much.") The screwball comedies of the ‘30s were farce-like, but contrary to popular belief, they weren't all that commercially successful, nor was the genre long-lived. For Americans, discomfort must have its limits, and today's "gross-out" movies are about as close as our pop culture comes to pure, unadulterated farce, which isn't very close at all. Take away the I-can't-believe-they-did-that slapstick of "There's Something About Mary" and what you're left with is yet another squashy-centered romantic comedy: the obstacle course through which the hapless hero must travel may be longer and more degrading, but Cameron Diaz still waits with open arms at the end.
McKinley High, by contrast, is a place where some problems don't get solved, some parents don't care enough, and some kids are unattractive, unhappy, and likely to remain so. To be sure, Lindsay will probably do all right as an adult--she is, after all, both smart and pretty, in a Janeane Garofalo-ish sort of way--but Daniel and the rest of the freaks probably won't. They know it, and so do we. It is thus wholly admirable, as well as wholly unexpected, that Fox Family Channel, of all places, should be giving a second chance to "Freaks and Geeks," a comedy from which teenagers can learn a valuable lesson about real life: it isn't always funny.
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P.S. My birthday is February 6. Belated gifts are acceptable, though.
Posted January 20, 2004 3:25 AM
