an appreciation of and lament for freaks & geeks

i missed freaks & geeks when it was on the air. never really been much for watching television, so i suppose it's no surprise, but after working through the series on dvd came a spell of low-grade retroactive guilt for not supporting the show during its brief run. because, gang, it was - is - really fetching good, funny and filled with pathos, and it's life was cut unfairly short.

the premise, for those of you who haven't seen it, centers on a middle class family in suburban michigan in the early 1980s with two high-school aged children. lindsay, the older of the two, chafes against the constraints of the good child and takes up with a less-achieving clan (freaks). her brother sam and his two best friends (geeks) are freshmen caught between earnest boyhoods and newly encroaching adult concerns. to those two groups of characters add everything you heard about or imagined or feared or did while in high school, played out in often hilariously painful detail, and you'll get a sense for the show.

all of the cast acquit themselves well to their roles, but martin starr as bill was a revelation. i shall long remember a particular scene, in the episode when his mother takes up with his gym teacher mr fredericks, when we watch a gloomy bill fix himself lunch, some plain-looking skimpy sandwich, and sit in front of the television - gary shandling is doing stand-up - to eat it. the entire montage consists of nothing more, really; just bill eating and laughing, his smile growing larger than you'd think possible. it's a remarkable moment, a statement, in some ways, on the power of comedy, and a pitch perfect example in its own right.

of course there are many other brilliant & memorable & surprisingly poignant scenes, and whole episodes, throughout the course of the season. too many to run down. it's better if you simply rent and watch the shows yourself. really, it's worth it. and since i trust you all to do this i won't give away the ending of the season, of the series (tragically it was canceled after one season), though it does involve a plot twist concerning the grateful dead and closes with one of their lovelier songs:

grateful dead - ripple



did you like that song? good, me too. now rent the show. because we might not have been able to prevent its cancellation but we can at least provide with a decent afterlife.