Following the struggles and adventures of Lindsay, a young teenager high school girl, who attends the Michigan high school during the 1980, wheen she joines a group of bad boys who smoke and addict drugs, and her younger brother, who suffers from a bully, but what that life will lead her to?
Mass audiences are only interested in reliving high school if it's sentimentalized. The chance to revisit something remotely in the ballpark of the real thing is as appetizing as cafeteria food-and Freaks and Geeks was a weekly feast of teen awkwardness.
This is the perfect introduction into the world. Not only have we immediately become immersed from the jump thanks to Joan Jett's Bad Reputation as well as a slew of other songs used in this episode, but the costuming drives the point home.
Paul Feig have fashioned a dramatic comedy that perhaps gets it a tad too right. Freaks and Geeks carries a sheen of bleakness, of sadness and depression that strives to equate the lives of middle teens with those of infantrymen on the front lines.
Freaks and Geeks distinguishes itself by the eerie realism of its portrayal of suburban high school life, circa 1980, from the ugly, boring clothes, to the across-the-board wonderful acting to the refreshing lack of narration.
On the geeks' side, Martin Starr is simply brilliant as Bill, a lanky kid who's both bumblingly incoherent and strangely charismatic - words really can't do him justice, but suffice it to say he's one of the all-time great TV nerds, Screech be damned.
Watching the show often feels like an out-of-body experience, as if one were watching oneself navigate through high school. This is exactly what makes the show so timeless.
Freaks and Geeks, despite its numerous flaws and hinting at Apatow's subsequent reliance on man-child humor in his feature films, often succeeds as humanist comedy precisely because the characters at its center are teenagers.
Freaks and Geeks is tapping into something primal: adolescents' hunger to begin to understand themselves and their world. Freaks and Geeks is too honest to offer answers. But it affirms the value and the universality of asking the questions.
