"Whether telling the story of an A student straying from her expected path..."
Robert Lloyd: "'Freaks and Geeks'... is one of the most beautiful and ambitious television series ever made. But its beauties are not cosmetic, and its ambitions are subtle."
"Whether telling the story of an A student straying from her expected path..."
"...a drummer whose dreams outstrip his talent..."
"...a kid addressing his parents’ foundering marriage through ventriloquism..."
"...or a geek who gets the girl of his dreams only to learn she bores him..."
"...the show always preferred emotional truth to rosy outcomes, character to type, and the complicated laugh to the easy one."
Linda Cardellini: "Here’s this girl [Lindsay] who desperately wants to be away from her parents and what they know her as, but at the same time truly does not want to disappoint or rebel against them and really loves them. It was a more interesting approach than all the other teenagers I was reading, who just hated their parents."
Paul Feig: "We did our infamous two weeks with the writers locking ourselves in a room and telling personal stories. I wrote a list of questions for everybody to answer: 'What was the best thing that happened to you in high school? What was the worst thing that happened to you in high school? Who were you in love with and why?'”
Judd Apatow: “'What was your worst drug experience? Who was your first girlfriend? What’s the first sexual thing you ever did? What’s the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you during high school?'”
Side note--I somehow never put it together that Michael from 10 Things I Hate About You played Neal's older brother.
Thomas F. Wilson: "The slightly sad seriousness with which Martin approached his role, to me, is the fulcrum of the whole show. It was really acting of a very high order."
Judd Apatow: "We didn’t think of [James Franco] as handsome. We thought his mouth was too big for his face and he seemed perfect to be a small-town cool guy who wasn’t as cool as he thought he was. When all the women in our office started talking about how gorgeous he was, me and Feig started laughing because we just didn’t see it."
John Francis Daley: "Franco went to Michigan for two weeks to get into character, and we were joking that he lived under an overpass for a few nights. He was always the one that had a Camus novel, heavily dog-eared, and his car was so full of junk that it looked like he lived out of it."
Seth Rogen: "At the time, I kind of had a chip on my shoulder, you know, because I hadn’t gotten any girls to sleep with me yet."
Judd Apatow: "The pilot had a very daring existential idea, which was that a young, really smart girl sits with her dying grandmother and asks her if she sees “the light,” and her grandma says no. And all the rules go out the window. The girl decides to have a more experimental high-school experience, because she doesn’t know if she believes anymore. I was always surprised that the network didn’t notice that that’s what our pilot was about."
Paul Feig: "I also really wanted the show to be about the fear of sex. I got tired of every teenager being portrayed as horny and completely cool with sex, because that was not my experience."
Judd Apatow: "You could split them into kids who are constantly trying to get older and kids that are desperately trying to hold on to their immaturity."
Busy Philipps: "Paul and Judd awkwardly tried to talk to Linda and me about how, now that we’re on a TV show, we shouldn’t think about losing weight, which had never even occurred to me. They were like, 'Don’t get crazy now—don’t think you have to be an actress that’s really skinny.' And I was reading things in the press about how we were the anti-Dawson’s Creek. There was one quote I remember very clearly, like, 'You won’t find any pretty people on Freaks and Geeks.' That was interesting as a 19-year-old girl to read. We were not standard packaging."
Stephen Lea Sheppard: "I think my actual high-school experience was a bit harsher. But there’s only so much you can show on television."
