It wasn't really "Judd Apatow's" Freaks And Geeks. Sure, he was very involved in the show and has had the biggest career after, but the sensibility of the show was different than everything else he's done and especially his solo follow-up, Undeclared...and that's largely because of its creator, Paul Feig.

@1 - Ditto. Paul Feig is the genius behind Freaks and Geeks. If you watch Undeclared you can see where Apatow took the Freaks and Geeks formula and turned it into his own brand of sentimental melodrama intermixed with gross out humor. But Paul Feig's vision was much more grounded in real life humiliation and failure as well.

So that's why I've never been able to get into "Undeclared"...thanks for the info.

Well, that and the fact that Undeclared was a half-hour and had no room to breathe...which Judd Apatow has acknowledged. It sounds like he wanted to work with some of the same folks again but do something lighter and seemingly more commercial...which bombed as bad as Freaks and Geeks as far as that goes. But yeah...I loved F&G and bought the Undeclared box but a few years later still haven't managed to get through the whole thing. Later in the series Jason Segal does turn up doing his pathetic-dumped-crying-sadsack routine, which is always fun.

Once nice scene that's all Apatow is Bill watching Garry Shandling do stand-up on television. (Man, I guess I've geeked out on this series a bit...)

this show was the purest, most perfect thing ever shown on television. yes, i fall in the worshiper camp - i want seven minutes in heaven with bill haverchuck!

KIM KELLY IS MY FRIEND.

Feig has written a couple of books that are well worth reading, "Kick Me" and "Superstud", which shed some light on where "Freaks and Geeks" came from (as if anyone who ever went to high school doesn't know where it came from).

Among the many, many, many great things in this series, I think my favorite is still Nick playing his 29-piece drum kit. And facing military school when he fails.

Failure is the central American experience, but is so seldom even tangentially addressed in media. "Freaks and Geeks" is miles and miles better than any movie made in this country in the past decade or more.