MTV Offered to Make "Freaks and Geeks" Season 2 After It Was Cancelled -- Here's Why It Didn't Happen

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Freaks and Geeks is widely considered one of the best TV shows ever made,
which is all the more impressive given the fact that it only lasted one
season. NBC didn't even let the show air all of its produced episodes during
its initial run. Almost from the onset, creator Paul Feig's heartbreakingly
honest high school-set drama series rubbed the new head of NBC the wrong way.
Feig and executive producer Judd Apatow were constantly being asked to give
the characters "more victories" from a network president who had never
attended public school and didn't relate to the stresses of just trying to
survive each day without total embarrassment.

Despite positive reviews and an ensemble cast that would almost all go on to
become huge stars in their own right, the show was finally cancelled after 13
episodes, with the remaining five episodes later airing as part of reruns on
Fox Family.

But while everyone laments the fact that Freaks and Geeks was gone too soon,
it turns out there was an offer from an unlikely source to make Freaks and
Geeks Season 2 a reality in the wake of NBC's cancellation.

I recently spoke with Apatow and Feig in separate interviews to celebrate the
series' first-ever release on Digital, and during my conversation with Apatow
he revealed there was a potential route for the series to continue. "When the
show was cancelled, there was an offer from MTV to continue making the show
at a much lower budget," Apatow said. "And we all decided we didn't want to
do a weaker version of the show."

This was 2000, and MTV was just coming off the launch of their raunchy
original series Undressed. But as Apatow says, the cable network couldn't
offer the same kind of budget that NBC afforded them, and no doubt Freaks and
Geeks on MTV would have looked much different.

When I spoke with Feig after Apatow, I asked him about the prospect of
continuing the show on MTV, and he explained that the time surrounding the
cancellation was a sad and confusing one for a number of reasons:

"It was a weird time for me because my mom died two days before we
got cancelled. So I was a little out of sorts, but I remember hearing
that [MTV offered to pick us up]. We probably just had to lose so
much stuff and music and budgets. We were already always strained on
our budget as it was."

A much lower budget no doubt would have meant losing much of the cast, and
the large ensemble was part of what made Freaks and Geeks so dimensional. But
Feig also admitted he and the crew were just exhausted at the end of the 18
episodes:

"I was so thrown and we'd worked so hard on that show. I mean, you
say it looked like a movie, that's really how we treated it. So, we
were ready to drop at the end of those 18 episodes. And then my mom
dies, and I think I had a moment of like, `I can't even deal with any
of this.' And then very quickly after the decisions were made, then
you're kind of like, `Oh my God, what did we do? Could we have pulled
it off if we had done it?'"

Feig acknowledges the possibility that Freaks and Geeks Season 2 on MTV could
have been great, but also notes there's something kind of nice about the way
that 18-episode first season exists as its own self-contained thing:

"There's moments so many times I go like, 'Wow, we just got away
with these 18 episodes,' and I'm sure we would've done other great
episodes, another great season. But at the same time, it's set in
amber now and there's something lovely about that."

There's also just no guarantee that a Freaks and Geeks season on MTV would
have felt the same. The music budget alone at NBC was no doubt astronomical,
and it's not like Feig and Apatow didn't find creative ways to address topics
like sex or drugs on broadcast television.

Feig added that people ask him if he's sad he never got to end the series,
but he counters that the finale episode "Discos and Dragons" - which was
written and directed by Feig to serve as a series finale when they knew the
threat of cancellation loomed large - purposefully feels like the end of high
school:

"People always go, `Oh, it's so sad you never got to end the series.'
It's like, `Well, we did end the series.' That whole episode was
about how everybody gets put on a different path. And we do that at
the end of the series because it's like when you graduate high
school, you don't know where half the people you went to high school
with go. I've always said the only true final episode for a show ever
was Six Feet Under because it showed how each one of the characters
died."

Look for much more from my interviews with Feig and Apatow on Collider soon.
Freaks and Geeks is now available to purchase on Digital for the first time
ever (with the original soundtrack intact), including Amazon, iTunes, and
Google.

--
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