In case you haven't noticed, Freaks & Geeks is this on again off again (or maybe I've just been busy since first seeing it) TV show brought to us by the good people at the National Biscuit -- I mean Broadcast Company (NBC). It's supposedly about growing up in Michigan during the mid 1980s, although there are a few nonsequitarish kinds of things... such as in one Episode they are waiting to greet Vice President George Bush and the next Episode some silver shirted disco fool was proclaiming the "NEW Rolling Stones song Miss You to be Disco when in fact I believe Miss You was actually off 1979's Some Girls and I thought the last stake had been driven through Disco's heart by Reagan's Inauguration, although I could be wrong and it doesn't matter because for anyone who was there the Eighties were a decade full of Sixties Style Potential to which it never lived up so if a bunch of kids want to run around one minute throwing open the doors to the disco to scream "Disco Sucks" and the next dancing like John Travolta in the midst of a crack overdose, I don't really give a shit.
But I do care about the show, which from the opening sequence of yearbook photos taken while the Ramones sing "I don't give a damn about my reputation..." to the touchy-feely-comic-drama (or sociopathic comedy... something like that) dinners of the Weir Family (our stars, Sam, Lindsay, Mom and Pop to many embarrassing but inevitable hijinks and end of the world type disasters through which adolescents go on an hourly basis, the show, to quote one of the "freaks", "ROCKS." Well, okay, it's pretty good... all right... I don't watch that much TV so possibly a dog food commercial would look good like good TV to me. Who gives a fuck. What you want? A freakin' review of The Sopranos?
The lynch pin... the ironic keystone which makes a show about NON gorgeous teens and their relatively dumpy parents so good is that it is kind of like a really good part of Ovid's Metamorphisis (one of the most boring works on Earth). See Lindsay is in the process of going from Mathelete Geek Queen to Freak following the Dead around the country in an old VW Bus with a big Steal Your Face logo [a/k/a "Beware, Acid Trippers on Board"] on the side, while her brother Sam, whom she truly loves (makes me long for my own sisters until I remember what miserable bitches... oh never mind) is stuck in eternal pre-pubescence and has the two most GEEKY friends on earth (Bill and Neil).
Yet Sam is actually cool, Bill gets to make out with the hottest chick in school for like an hour because he's funny and Neil will someday perform brain surgery (OK, maybe dentistry) on important people at Cedars Sinai. See, as if you couldn't guess this would be the message of a show called Freaks & Geeks , we're all weird in our own way... our own equally bizarre ways, and all, to varying degrees, are at the same time gripping drastically onto our personal identities.
On the show Freaks & Geeks one can never be too sure who is "freak" and who is "geek," because as tends to happen in such moralizing tales, all ore equally freaky and equally geeky... well, except the female tuba player one of the Freaks was dating who turned out to be a hermaphrodite -- and you don't even need to pay extra for this show.
Perhaps my one complaint about Freaks & Geeks is that the so-called Freaks smoke so little pot it's pathetic, yet they all look permanently stoned. Nevertheless, I give this show a 4 on the BDH scale of Quality Programing. Tune it in, whether you were/are freak or geek or nerdy guidance counselor who used to be a hippie and still has long hair.....