For the Geek in You, Get Your Freak On
Good article on the quickly-cancelled series Freaks and Geeks that asks the question, do only the good shows die young? As before, excerpts in bold:
Like Wonderfalls, My So-Called Life, and other ill-fated explorations of the adolescent psyche, Freaks and Geeks seemed to fall through every imaginable crack. But on any given night, the show’s audience was 6.5 million strong, and so adoring that viewers eventually bonded together to buy a full-page Variety ad protesting its cancellation (which came midway through its very first season, in March of 2000). It’s easy to imagine that, given a modicum of network support, the show’s audience might have doubled, and doubled again.
I still think it’s mad and childish to put money into things like a full-page Variety ad protesting the cancellation of any series–sound familiar? But I will admit that these fans had more of a quarrel than do the “Angel Avengers.” That much-mocked group believe their favorite show deserves more time to find an audience after three years setting the character up on Buffy, plus the five on his own program. In short, it’s had every chance, it hasn’t succeded. Freaks and Geeks, it can be well argued, was never even given half a chance.
I was never a part of that adoring audience, though my aforementioned pal Corey Klemow was and is. At his behest I watched two or three episodes when they ran in a marathon, which led me to believe the truth of this next statement:
…Freaks and Geeks’ great strength, its realism, was also its Achilles’ heel. When NBC did appoint a programming director–the preppy Garth Ancier, who would go down in infamy among the show’s fans, and go on to run the WB–word filtered down to producer Judd Apatow that the executive was bewildered by Freaks and Geeks’ worm’s-eye view of life at a blue-collar public school. For Ancier, it seems, television served not to reflect reality, or intensify it, but to offer ways in which we might escape it: “He would like the kids to have more victories,” Apatow wrote, in a show diary published in the Los Angeles Times. “I tell him the point of the program is to show how our characters survive the obstacles of high school with their compassion and sense of humor intact.” Somehow, Apatow failed to get his point across: “I just want the work to be truthful,” he continued. “Why do you want it to be truthful?” Ancier is supposed to have replied. “It’s TV.”
