Feig, Paul

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    ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ TV’s Least Likely to Succeed, Won by Losing

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    The high school cringe comedy was the undersung member of the Class of ’99. But its influence is everywhere.By the 25th reunion, you get a good sense of how time has treated a graduating class. This is certainly true of TV’s Class of ’99.There, in the center of the room, is “The West Wing,” that popular class president among dramas, holding court and reliving its glory days (even if some of its youthful luster is gone). There’s “The Sopranos,” the brooding film student that went on to big things, still exuding a sense of artsy danger. There are “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Family Guy,” still turning out new episodes, like classmates who stuck around and joined the faculty.And who’s that off in the corner? Oh, right: “Freaks and Geeks.” Weird, funny kid, never quite fit in. Used to hang out on the smoking patio, played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Whatever happened to them?In its freshman (and only) year, “Freaks and Geeks” spent a lot of time getting stuffed into lockers (or, at least, stuffed by NBC into undesirable time slots). An offbeat teen series about burnouts and nerds at a Michigan high school in the 1980-81 school year, it arrived on Sept. 25, 1999, with the praise of critics and a niche sensibility.That combo, in the days of mass network TV, tended to mark a new series as Least Likely to Succeed, and NBC axed it midyear. The complete season aired in 2000 on Fox Family Channel, a cable destination one step up from a test pattern.But like the homeroom wallflower who blossomed late, this bittersweetly brilliant one-season wonder aged well, into something influential, groundbreaking and — dare I say it — cool.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Freaks and Geeks’ at 25: ‘It Was Slipping Away the Entire Time’

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      To twist a famous line from Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” the awful — and hilarious — thing about high school is this: Everyone has their reasons. All adolescents are worlds unto themselves, whether they’re jerks, jocks, stoners, smart kids or underachievers. Each is an entire cosmos of yearning and hurt trapped inside a juvenile body.Perhaps no television show has ever done as much to document those reasons as the short-lived NBC series “Freaks and Geeks.” Set in Michigan in 1980, it followed the misadventures of the siblings Lindsay and Sam Weir (Linda Cardellini and John Francis Daley) and their respective crews of burnouts and dweebs.Afflicted with poor ratings, “Freaks and Geeks” was canceled after just one season. But it has lived on, first in fans’ memories and then on DVD and streaming, to be discovered by new viewers who embraced its zits-and-all depiction of adolescence and were thrilled by early sightings of future stars like Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel and Busy Philipps.“Freaks and Geeks” premiered on Sept. 25, 1999. On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, The New York Times spoke with veterans of the show, including the creator Paul Feig and the writer-executive producer Judd Apatow, about an experience that, like adolescence, was sometimes painful and embarrassing, but was nonetheless imbued with a kind of magic. These are edited excerpts from the interviews.‘We were a bunch of nerds.’A writer-director has many memories about the agonies of adolescence and decides to make a TV show about them.Paul Feig, left, based “Freaks and Geeks” on his adolescent experiences, and Judd Apatow, right, quickly signed on to produce.Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Jackpot!’ Review: Dystopia, Hollywood Style

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      Awkwafina and John Cena star in a fitfully funny near-future comedy with strangely mixed metaphors.In the near future, things are not very different. People wear the same clothes as we do, ride the bus to work, call each other on cellphones and stay in terrible Airbnbs run by hosts from hell. In the near future, everything is still expensive. And if you want to be an actor, you move to Los Angeles.Yet a few things have changed. Following the Great Depression of 2026, the government of California — as desperate for money as its people are — instituted a Grand Lottery in which one citizen of Los Angeles wins some huge sum. Sounds great, but unfortunately whoever wrote the law seems to be a fan of “The Purge.” Until sundown on Lottery Day, anyone who successfully kills the lottery winner (all weapons allowed except guns) gets the winnings. After sundown, murder becomes illegal again, until next year.Somehow the Michigander Katie (Awkwafina) missed this news, and thus had the bad fortune to arrive in Los Angeles to pursue her dream of acting the night before Lottery Day 2030. She, of course, accidentally wins the $3.6 billion jackpot while at an audition. Suddenly, everyone is after her, and the only person she can maybe trust is a “freelance protector” named Noel (John Cena, who may be Hollywood’s most dependably funny actor). He’ll get her safely to sundown. Probably.This is quite the dystopian view of the future, though other movies have proposed that within a few decades, we’ll resort to state-sanctioned violence to secure our daily bread. In the world of Boots Riley’s comedy “Sorry to Bother You,” for instance, game show contestants beat themselves to a pulp to collect money and pay off their debts. Or, of course, there’s “Squid Game.”More dystopian, though, is the sense that in this version of the near future, nobody is capable of relating to anyone except through money. Only hours into her new L.A. life, Katie tells off a man (Adam Ray) who’s complaining loudly about his young daughter’s failure to get acting jobs that will line his pockets — as his daughter sits right next to him. Moments later, Katie meets a kind older woman (Becky Ann Baker) who wishes her luck, and then, quietly, swipes Katie’s watch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 50, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Still Cuts Deep

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      Eli Roth, Paul Feig and other directors with movies out this month explain how this gory horror classic has inspired their work.The movies never recovered after “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” hit theaters in 1974. Focused on a family of cannibalistic, butcherous crazies living in a rural house of horrors, Tobe Hooper’s sleaze-oozing film rattled audiences and was banned in some places. It also inspired filmmakers to take horror in new, more brutal directions.Fede Álvarez, director of the forthcoming “Alien: Romulus,” said that the “unapologetic savagery” of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” influenced his work.“It’s a humbling reminder of how a hard dose of unsolicited anarchy onscreen is a key ingredient for any horror movie that hopes to endure the test of time,” he said.Beginning Aug. 8, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will offer a weeklong run of the film timed to its 50th anniversary, and will follow that with a retrospective (Aug. 13-20) of Hooper’s other less shocking but still daring genre films from the 1980s, including “Poltergeist” (1982) and “Invaders From Mars” (1986).MoMA didn’t dawdle in taking “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” seriously: It added the film to its collection two years after the movie came out.“Its power hasn’t dimmed,” said Ron Magliozzi, a curator in MoMA’s film department and the organizing curator for the series. “It has matured.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More