Do you remember senioritis? It was that feeling back in high school when graduation was so close that it didn’t matter what you did anymore. Well, when the cast and crew of the NBC teen dramedy “Freaks & Geeks” learned that they were on the verge of cancellation, they started to lean into their senioritis a little bit more. And, surprisingly, this attitude made the show better.
In Vanity Fair’s 2013 oral history of one of the best coming-of-age shows of all time, executive producer Judd Apatow revealed that the episode “The Little Things,” an excellent commentary on the many disappointments faced by teenagers, may never have happened if the show wasn’t on the chopping block — specifically, the storyline in which Seth Rogen’s Ken falls in love with a tuba player named Amy and learns that she was born as an intersex woman with “ambiguous genetalia.” After a lot of back and forth with himself and his friends about it, Ken ultimately doubles down on his declaration of love and apologizes for how he reacted to finding out.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Apatow said they decided to get “ambitious and aggressive” by employing storylines that “you would never approve if the show had a chance of surviving.” He also described this as a “‘F*** you'” to the network. Director Jake Kasdan added, “There was this sense that it wasn’t going to last, so the network wasn’t really going to try to fix it.”
NBC didn’t understand Freaks & Geeks
Throughout the entire process of making “Freaks & Geeks,” NBC proved time and time again that they fundamentally did not understand the show or its characters. In a 2009 interview with The Guardian, writer Gabe Sachs recalled an occasion when executives asked about John Francis Daley’s nerdy and awkward Sam Weir making out with a cheerleader.
“In reality, a special moment to us in high school was when we were sitting next to a girl and our knees were touching, never mind actually making out! But the network didn’t buy that at all,” he said. “They also wanted James Franco to take off his shirt, Britney Spears to make a guest appearance, and everyone to actually be cool.”
Of course, that was the antithesis of what “Freaks & Geeks” was meant to be: a genuine, honest look at what adolescence was like for teens in public school in the 1980s. And though the acclaimed series was cancelled way too soon, fans later turned it into a cult classic, proving that they, at least, appreciate more than the network ever did.
