Freaks and Geeks at 25: ‘It was slipping away the entire time’

The beloved high-school sitcom debuted in September 1999 and lasted one season. Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and others look back on the show’s birth, death and long afterlife. 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 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 cancelled 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 September 25, 1999. On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, The New York Times spoke with veterans of the show, including creator Paul Feig and writer-executive producer Judd Apatow, about an experience that, like adolescence, was sometimes painful and embarrassing, but was no.