Freaks and Geeks is widely considered one of the best TV shows ever made, which is all the more impressive given the fact that it only lasted one season. NBC didn’t even let the show air all of its produced episodes during its initial run. Almost from the onset, creator Paul Feig’s heartbreakingly honest high school-set drama series rubbed the new head of NBC the wrong way. Feig and executive producer Judd Apatow were constantly being asked to give the characters “more victories” from a network president who had never attended public school and didn’t relate to the stresses of just trying to survive each day without total embarrassment.
Despite positive reviews and an ensemble cast that would almost all go on to become huge stars in their own right, the show was finally cancelled after 13 episodes, with the remaining five episodes later airing as part of reruns on Fox Family.
But while everyone laments the fact that Freaks and Geeks was gone too soon, it turns out there was an offer from an unlikely source to make Freaks and Geeks Season 2 a reality in the wake of NBC’s cancellation.
I recently spoke with Apatow and Feig in separate interviews to celebrate the series’ first-ever release on Digital, and during my conversation with Apatow he revealed there was a potential route for the series to continue. “When the show was cancelled, there was an offer from MTV to continue making the show at a much lower budget,” Apatow said. “And we all decided we didn’t want to do a weaker version of the show.”
This was 2000, and MTV was just coming off the launch of their raunchy original series Undressed. But as Apatow says, the cable network couldn’t offer the same kind of budget that NBC afforded them, and no doubt Freaks and Geeks on MTV would have looked much different.
When I spoke with Feig after Apatow, I asked him about the prospect of continuing the show on MTV, and he explained that the time surrounding the cancellation was a sad and confusing one for a number of reasons:
“It was a weird time for me because my mom died two days before we got cancelled. So I was a little out of sorts, but I remember hearing that [MTV offered to pick us up]. We probably just had to lose so much stuff and music and budgets. We were already always strained on our budget as it was.”
A much lower budget no doubt would have meant losing much of the cast, and the large ensemble was part of what made Freaks and Geeks so dimensional. But Feig also admitted he and the crew were just exhausted at the end of the 18 episodes:
“I was so thrown and we'd worked so hard on that show. I mean, you say it looked like a movie, that's really how we treated it. So, we were ready to drop at the end of those 18 episodes. And then my mom dies, and I think I had a moment of like, ‘I can't even deal with any of this.’ And then very quickly after the decisions were made, then you're kind of like, ‘Oh my God, what did we do? Could we have pulled it off if we had done it?’”
Feig acknowledges the possibility that Freaks and Geeks Season 2 on MTV could have been great, but also notes there’s something kind of nice about the way that 18-episode first season exists as its own self-contained thing:
“There's moments so many times I go like, 'Wow, we just got away with these 18 episodes,' and I'm sure we would've done other great episodes, another great season. But at the same time, it's set in amber now and there's something lovely about that.”
There’s also just no guarantee that a Freaks and Geeks season on MTV would have felt the same. The music budget alone at NBC was no doubt astronomical, and it’s not like Feig and Apatow didn’t find creative ways to address topics like sex or drugs on broadcast television.
Feig added that people ask him if he’s sad he never got to end the series, but he counters that the finale episode “Discos and Dragons” – which was written and directed by Feig to serve as a series finale when they knew the threat of cancellation loomed large – purposefully feels like the end of high school:
“People always go, ‘Oh, it's so sad you never got to end the series.’ It's like, ‘Well, we did end the series.’ That whole episode was about how everybody gets put on a different path. And we do that at the end of the series because it's like when you graduate high school, you don't know where half the people you went to high school with go. I've always said the only true final episode for a show ever was Six Feet Under because it showed how each one of the characters died.”
Look for much more from my interviews with Feig and Apatow on Collider soon. Freaks and Geeks is now available to purchase on Digital for the first time ever (with the original soundtrack intact), including Amazon, iTunes, and Google.