Freaks and Geeks

“Freaks and Geeks” was a wonderful show, but it’s frankly absurd to say that it was better than “The Wire.” They’re not even in the same ballpark.

It’s OK, I liked Freaks and Geeks better than The Wire too. Although the writers did have to thread the needle between depressing and uplifting quite a lot. I’ve noticed the same issue in other great shows – Battlestar Galactica, for example.

Oh, and Chris, you’d love it. Worth getting it from the UK site (on NTSC Region 1) and watching on your computer.

I don’t think it’s better than The Wire, but it is an extraordinary show–smart, sad, funny, and above all absolutely true. (And the fact that it’s set just a year or so after I graduated is just lagniappe.)

DVD bonus: every episode has commentary, and some have more than one commentary track. And they are, by and large, immensely entertaining.

Everyone so far is incorrect. The best TV in the last 20 years was Firefly. Quite appropriately, it spawned the best sci-fi movie of all time. It’s sad when so many smart people can be so wrong about such a simple thing.

I like the acknowledgment of the superiority of The Prisoner implicit in the 20-years-ago timeframe. At least, I assume that’s what’s intended. What else could it be?

Also, Firefly sucked. Characters that all speak the same precious and twee nonsense aren’t rendered distinct by different costumes.

I have all sorts of indirect reasons to believe The Wire is “true” in all sorts of ways, but I–like most readers here, I imagine–*know* that F&G rings true. I don’t think that makes it better than The Wire, but it does make it pretty great.

My So-Called Life is indeed even better than Freaks and Geeks, as hard as that may be to believe. (It was even on network television. And the network tried to keep from killing it! Man, those days were incredible.) I definitely recommend you find a copy, Harry. The episode with Roger Rees is perhaps the best thing ever shown on network television.

MSCL not only makes you recognize your experience it makes you relive it all the realism and emotion that entials. What an absolutely incredible show.

Yes, I also don’t understand rasselas’ use of the word ‘twee’ regarding Firefly. I had to look it up to make sure I knew what it meant: yes, it means “overly precious” or “affectedly dainty or refined”. When the captain says “I aim to do some misbehavin'” it might be faux cowboy and affectedly rugged but no way is it twee!

The Gilmore Girls is twee.

I heard that interview this morning and I’m now very hot to see the movie he’s currently working on. A send up of the musical genius biopic (e.g. Ray, Walk The Line) starring John C. Reilly? Sign me up!

As for Firefly, I must must temper my criticism, since the woman I love adores it so much. When we first started dating she made me watch the whole DVD collection with her. I will allow that if you have to watch cowboys in space, doing it with a beautiful woman certainly takes the edge off.

The main issue I had with Firefly was that it’s not nearly as clever or smart as it thinks it is, which can really be annoying at times. I did enjoy watching it, but I don’t see what makes people rave about it.

Phoenician, I might have suggested going with an imputation of racism or sexism as your primary attack, but the middle-class/middlebrow thing is effective, too, given the status anxiety rampant in the commenting class.

Your apologies are duly accepted, but they can never exceed my own shame at having expressed an opinion dissenting from right-thinking affection for the witty plotting and intricate repartee of that Whedon guy. Indeed, it is I who should apologize to you. The only thing I can do now is try to live with myself, taking it day by day.

radek
Iron Maiden is closer to us than you think.

In that case
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tb8Jo11uGo

The Prisoner… I dunno, it was a really ambitious show that tried to create suspense through symbolism and mystery and never really letting you know what was going on but in the end it just didn’t know how to resolve itself. If it explained all the puzzles, riddles and symbols at the end it wouldn’t have been true to its nature and any such explanations would’ve surely been very stretched and farcical. On the other hand, leaving the viewers hanging would’ve been crappy too and sort of saying “ha ha none of this really meant anything”. So it went for extra weirdness and surrealism towards the end but to me at least that just felt way forced. Anyone who thinks that all the answers to the show’s puzzles are within the show is just goofy thinkin’. Paddy Fitz and other writers were just making stuff up as they went along. Half of it doesn’t mean anything.

“Lost” has sort of a similar problem now, except of course there’s the added incentive of drawing it out and milking it for all it’s worth, whereas I think those considerations didn’t play a role for McGoohan.

Man, I’m nerding out today.

I find it really, really, REALLY hard to believe that I am apparently the fist person here whose response to the idea of F&G as best American TV show was not “What about Buffy?!?!”

The best TV show of the last 20 years was Remember WENN, but it’s not available on DVD and was only ever on American Movie Classics, so very few people saw it. And of course it’s about a radio station in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Daria seems so distant in my memory that I don’t think I can objectively judge it. Is it out on DVD?

In any case, I was reminded more of college (or at least, college at a big state school) by Daria than high school — all the characters had discovered enough about themselves that their facades fit naturally. There wasn’t the sort of tension that F & G or Buffy were so good at exploiting.

I vote for Twin Peaks.

I did see more than a few episodes of My So Called Life when it was on and thought it was awful- over-acted, sterotypical, annoying characters, hysterical reactions to small problems, and so on. This is to say that it was, in fact, quite a bit like high-school since high-school also has all of those features.

My reaction to MSCL was that the creators of Thirtysomething–oh, excuse me, I mean thirtysomething had found an age group in which the behavior of their characters was developmentally appropriate instead of merely insufferable.

I like all these shows (i haven’t seen the wire yet). but has no-one seen Slings and Arrows? I suppose it may not qualify as a ‘tv show’ …more of an ongoing mini-series (though it does seem to have definitively ended after the third run). But if you were either freak or geek, and/or drama nerd, then you must MUST watch it. Which means you’ll have to order the dvd’s from canada…..

I suppose I just figured out why no-one has watched it.

Slings and Arrows is next up on our Netflix queue, coincidentally.

These lengthy but closed-ended shows make motion pictures seem like short stories in comparision, with the way they can lavish time on developing character and place that even the longest films can’t touch.

Phoenician, I might have suggested going with an imputation of racism or sexism as your primary attack, but the middle-class/middlebrow thing is effective, too, given the status anxiety rampant in the commenting class.

The problem with that approach is that it is too easy to get both race and gender wrong on the internet.

Your apologies are duly accepted, but they can never exceed my own shame at having expressed an opinion dissenting from right-thinking affection for the witty plotting and intricate repartee of that Whedon guy. Indeed, it is I who should apologize to you. The only thing I can do now is try to live with myself, taking it day by day.

If you find the shame too much, I have one piece of advice – up and down the wrist, not across. Much more reliable, and so much easier for the embalmers to deal with.

As someone currently attending high school in New Zealand, I am baffled whenever I see people praising a show like F&G for it’s accurate depictions of high school life. Are American high schools really like that? At mine (a fairly large one, with close to 2000 students), sure there’s some cliquery, but the social networks are far more complicated than American TV would have you believe, and the majority of people, as far as I can tell, are genuinely happy.
NB: under this weird American labelling system I am a “nerd” or “geek”.

This thread demonstrates that internet posters absolutely cannot be trusted on the relative merits of sci-fi shows (or books…). The heavy geek overrepresentation skews everything. Battlestar Galactica is better than the original, is about all you can say. Next we’ll have people saying Dr. Who is better than the Sopranos.

Speaking of the Sopranos, is it getting hip to diss that great show? Granted, it’s fallen off lately, but the first 4-5 seasons deserve their rep as the best series ever. A couple of others compete (The Wire, yes), but nothing surpasses.

The Corner was a special case though…in one sense maybe the best show ever, but in another sense such a journey into misery and despair that it was almost unwatchable. The Wire was the next effort by the same crew…it basically adds enough unrealistic melodrama and unlikely super-human characters to make the world of inner-city Baltimore depicted in The Corner entertaining. Once you see The Corner, The Wire, great as it is, sort of looks like NYPD Blue by comparison.

What the hell?! Both comments are back! Disregard everything I said in the previous comment. This is weird, man. I refreshed multiple times before submitting that.

I agree with Bruce, Daria is a great depiction of high school, not necessarily because it’s more accurate, but because it’s more critical (and definitely funny). For those who care, you can sometimes catch it being played on noggin (at least you could last year). And to kadin, from someone recently out of an american hs, I hate to say that a lot of these depictions of the high school social system are quite accurate. The only time they miss the mark is when they show the kids at the not-cool end caring so much about the popular kids. In my experience, the lower down the ladder you were, the less you even thought about the cooler crowd. Only those who were sort of cool but not quite cool enough to be included cared about those above them (which I think Daria does a good job showing). So even though the cliques are tight, people didn’t really care as much as the shows make you think.

I’ve never seen F&G, but a short answer to Kadin’s question is probably, “yes”.

My school experience was near Houston, TX, in the late 80’s/early 90′. Since then, when speaking to people from other countries, and more civilized portions of the US, all are amazed that the social distinctions and cliques are so rigidly defined, and absolute.

Well, subjectivity is objectivity.

Also, where’s the love for “Veronica Mars”? Some fleshed out, 3D characters, tight writing, good themes, commentary, and so forth. Sure, it’s no “Working Stiffs,” but it’s pretty durn good. Shoosh, dude, there’s a string of like five eps with Big Lebowski references/jokes. What’s to not like about that?

Am I the only one who thought that Hill Street Blues, in its time, was the best show Hollywood had ever created to that point?

This is the show that ended the first episode by (apparently) killing off two main characters. I mean in 1980, TV didn’t *do* things like that. That had complex, multi-episode story lines that were difficult to follow. That had characters who never redeemed themselves.

That first 2 minutes, when the late Michael Conrad finishes the morning briefing and then says ‘Heh, let’s be careful out there’

and then the credits roll with the police despatcher voiceover:

‘Call dispatch. Armed robbery in progress, see surplus store corner People’s Drive and 124th Street.’

And like knights riding out of the castle, the boys in blue roll their cruisers out onto the streets.

And then one episode, Michael Conrad was dead, and Betty Thomas’s character is appointed duty sergeant, and as she finishes the first morning briefing

‘and heh, let’s be careful out there’.

For a moment, she’s not acting, the cast and the characters are one at the loss of their colleague.

I am sure Homicide, the Wire, the Corner have surpassed it. Let alone Buffy. For various reasons, I am in a TV near zero zone since the late 1980s (try it sometime– you will have a better, happier life).

(On the animated track, Daria was very, very clever. A bit too adult and knowing perhaps. But Samurai Jack beats them all– see the work Genady Tartovsky went on to do in ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’ (the first series wasn’t great, but the second).)

And in the history of television, who could forget those first 120 seconds of Hill Street Blues?

Hill Street Blues was groundbreaking all right. So was “St. The first TV shows that dared to be gritty.

I’ve actually met a number of cops who loved the old “Barney Miller” though…kind of a cross between a cop show, a sitcom, and Sartre’s “No Exit”.

mq

Barney Miller was apparently dead on accurate. Remember when Harris (the black cop) couldn’t get an apartment because the landlord said New York cop was not a stable job?

If you remember the film K-Pax (Kevin Spacey as a maybe alien) then there was a Barney Miller episode which was even better: when the alien tells Harris about the future price of zinc, and Harris is running around ‘has anyone ever heard of a town called ‘Medicine Hat’?

Cops I knew said being a cop was 20% Adam 12 and 80% Barney Miller.

I got bored of the melodrama in St. Elsewhere (yes, I know, the same thing happened on Hill Street) and the more and more extreme plots. But the one where Dr. Sigmund Ausfaller refuses to allow the hospital to join in Reagan Administration planning for nuclear war, and quotes Robert Oppenheimer (quoting the Hindu Scripture) at the detonation of the first atomic bomb

‘for I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’

was completely classic.

And the scene where they show the head of the hospital’s autistic son being treated with electroshock, and at the end him reading his son a story.

For the same sort of thing, and killed off because of actor Ed Asner’s stance against the Reagan Administration, Lou Grant.

In particular, the episode where the US and USSR face off over ‘Kular’ (read: Iran) and the episode, having run all over the issues of nuclear war, ends with an ambush of American troops, and as the rest of the cast leave the newsroom, Lou Grant saying ‘no, I’m gonna sit here and watch TV, and see how it all comes out’.

Well, I saw the entire Beverly Hillbillies first season run in ’61 (or was it ’62?). One of the high points of western culture, with a cultural resonance close to Beethoven’s late quartets and the plays of Aeschylus. I pity the fools who weren’t there to witness it. Glorious it was in that dawn to be alive!

In my experience, American high schools do have quite extreme cliquery, though obviously more complicated and with much more fluidity than can be portrayed on TV. Also, for many Americans high school is perhaps the most miserable time of their lives. Large public high schools are cruel and inhuman.

valuethinker — you know that you can now get The Survivors on DVD (UK region, but you can play it on a computer if you’re in the US)? I’m startled by how good it is (having seen it first in my teens, the first time round).

OK, anyone up for a post on school size?

It’s amazing that no one has mentioned the aborted “Wonderland” or the long-running “Homicide” in the drama category. I liked “Firefly” on DVD — where the 2-hour intro is shown first, not Fox’s ‘let’s start with the 2nd episode (3rd hour) first’ — but it was no BtVS.

There is a good epsiode of “Dinner for Five” with Judd Apatow, who was F&G’s executive producer commiserating with Peter Berg, who a “Wonderland” ex. pro., over how their shows were cancelled.