getting your freak on … TV

This week, Freaks and Geeks finally made it to DVD, prompting Slate's Alex Abramovich to ask if the show was simply "too real" to have made it on network TV.

How could a show that meant so much to so many disappear so quickly? Watching the DVDs, a better question presents itself: How did a show like this get made in the first place? As it happens, Freaks and Geeks was green-lighted by NBC's West Coast chief Scott Sassa during a lull in which the network found itself temporarily bereft of a programming director. It was written, cast, and filmed with little guidance from network executives, and its roster of mathletes, midgets, bullies, and burnouts had little in common with the Vogue-worthy stars of shows like The O.C. "The problem with TV now," Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig told LA Weekly not long after the series was canceled, is that "you have to make friends immediately—which is why the network wants actors to be beautiful. … You become infatuated with them, and you'll watch week after week because they're beautiful and they're your surrogate boyfriend/girlfriend."

…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."