PAUL FEIG: I had just come off of a year of trying to promote this movie I’d written, directed, produced, and paid for, and I had lost a good-paying acting job before that on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. One day I bumped into him and said, “If you have any ideas for TV, let me know.” I didn’t think he would hand me a finished script a few months later, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be the best thing I have ever worked on. JUDD APATOW: By the late 90s, Paul’s acting career wasn’t going anywhere, so he started trying to write. Everybody should be nice to him because he could be running the town someday.” He was the most mature 17-year-old I’d ever met in my life. At the same time, he was booking his own stand-up night at some club, working for Comic Relief. Judd was younger than everyone else-he was really considered to be just a kid. ![]() That was our routine every night for years. PAUL FEIG: We would go out and do our stand-up shows and reconvene at the Ranch and play poker and drink coffee until the sun came up. I also used to see Paul in comedy clubs and thought he was really funny. from the Midwest, and all they did was smoke cigarettes and watch infomercials. It was all these guys who had come out to L.A. ![]() JUDD APATOW: I had first met Paul in the mid-80s, hanging around “the Ranch,” this incredibly cheap house a bunch of comedians rented really deep in the boonies in the San Fernando Valley. Feig, an actor known, relatively speaking, for the movies Ski Patrol and Heavyweights (co-written by Apatow, who brought Feig in) and short runs on the TV series Dirty Dancing, Good Sports, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, has written, directed, and starred in an independent feature, Life Sold Separately, which he has been touring to college campuses. Apatow, whose credits as writer and director include The Ben Stiller Show and The Larry Sanders Show, has a development deal at DreamWorks. Judd Apatow and Paul Feig are friends from the Los Angeles comedy world. T he Freaks and Geeks story begins in late 1998. And Apatow and Feig re-teamed not long ago, as producer and director of the 2011 hit Bridesmaids. ![]() Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and James Franco-in their first roles or first roles of note, like nearly all their young castmates-got their start there. It was also the wellspring of a dominant force in 21st-century comedy: the School of Apatow. ![]() Whether telling the story of an A student straying from her expected path, a drummer whose dreams outstrip his talent, a kid addressing his parents’ foundering marriage through ventriloquism, or a geek who gets the girl of his dreams only to learn she bores him, the show-unusual for a network series-always preferred emotional truth to rosy outcomes, character to type, and the complicated laugh to the easy one. Both on-screen and behind the scenes, the story of Freaks and Geeks is one of community beating against the odds and growing stronger for it.Īn hour-long comedy with drama at its core (a “dramedy,” to use the then current term of art), the series centered on a sister and brother, 16-year-old Lindsay Weir and 14-year-old Sam, and, widening its frame, the outsider crowds in which the Weirs run-the older freaks for Lindsay, the younger geeks for Sam-as everyone copes with the sad, hilarious unfairness of life. But its beauties are not cosmetic, and its ambitions are subtle. Though you would not think it of a show set in a suburb of Detroit during the 1980–81 school year, Freaks and Geeks, which premiered on NBC in the fall of 1999, is one of the most beautiful and ambitious television series ever made.
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