10/2/2023 0 Comments World star hip hop freaks reviewFeig and Apatow’s show is certainly all of these things, and, at first glance, you might be forgiven for thinking it will be fun but forgettable, indistinguishable, at core, from the bevy of other scholastic bildungsromans out there.īut you’d be wrong. Why care about yet another entry in the bloated genre of high-school coming-of-age stories-one canceled in its first season, no less? To be fair, I usually enjoy media of this ilk, anyway: the natural theatrics of high-school tales, the cuteness of teenage crushes, the high-stakes yearning and churning for identities. Her evolution-geek to freak, freak to geek, then, finally, her decision to simply be herself-forms the main arc of Freaks and Geeks, though the show also follows a wide cast of other protagonists, including Lindsay’s petite younger brother Sam and his geeky friends Bill and Neal, as well as a passel of secondary characters, from love interests and pugnacious bullies to a queer tubist and a philandering dentist. The freaks-Daniel Desario, Kim Kelly, Ken Miller, and Nick Andopolis-in turn, have been conditioned to laugh off overachievers like her, but, through the alchemy of time, the geek and the freaks become closer, until Lindsay has become one of them, altering the course of everyone’s life. Set in a small Michigan town in the 1980s, the show follows Lindsay Weir, a high-school Mathlete and all-around academic wunderkind, who decides to start hanging out with a radically different crowd-the freaks, as the school styles them, who smoke, skip class, have sex, cheat on tests, and, in general, do all the things Lindsay has been raised to view as verboten. On paper, Freaks and Geeks, which aired between 19 and was produced by Paul Feig and Judd Apatow, might seem generic, if not outright unremarkable. Those of us who don’t know where, if anywhere, we belong-and have learnt, at least sometimes, to be okay with that not-knowing. It was a show for those of us who have a foot in more than one place, those of us for whom “home” is a language we can’t quite speak, for whom home is wanting to dock at two ports with a single ship on a night of tempests. While someone like me was not represented in the show directly, it spoke to me in the liminal spaces I knew so well, capturing characters in search for their identities in an ever-shifting world. At the time, I was also a brown trans woman in the closet about her identity. We were also the kids-as adults-who didn’t quite fit in, the geeks who freaked and the freaks who geeked, walking between worlds-our homes, America-we were not fully at home in. Neither my Pakistani friend nor I had grown up in the world the show depicted-I had gone to secondary school in Dominica, and my first significant experience of American schooling was in college in Florida-yet we both connected with it immediately. But I was always looking for new ways to feel less lonely at this lachrymose stage of my life, so I started up the first episode, expecting, if nothing else, a way to pass time. I had never heard of it as a bookish child who had grown up in another country, my grasp of American television felt weak. Watching Freaks and Geeks, she replied, a show about American high-schoolers. One night, when I was alone in my quiet, faintly musty apartment, as I often was during my grad-school days in Tallahassee, I asked a friend of mine from Pakistan what she was up to. This is Wander, Woman, a column by Gabrielle Bellot about books and culture, the body, memory, and more.
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