My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #27, February 21, 2000

OF FREAKS AND GEEKS

There's a new show called Freaks and Geeks that you should try to catch before NBC cancels it. Network execs who haven't figured out exactly who its natural audience is are letting it die because they don't know when to run it and how to promote it. They obviously think that because it's ABOUT adolescents, this show is FOR adolescents, but it's not. The show is set in the early 80's because it's designed for us, grownups who can now look back on those scarring teenage years with reflection and tranquility and amusement.

You see, none of us, not even the popular kids, escaped scarring, because we were amateurs at living then, trying to figure out who we were and what people thought of us and how we were supposed to treat other people. The kids on this show are doing what we did: trying on different identities to see if they fit, and going back and forth between the hope that they've achieved coolness and the fear that they've just made complete asses of themselves. They wear the same sort of masks we used to put on to protect all our raw nerve-endings, so concerned with their own hurts they don't notice the hurts they are dealing out to others until the damage is done.

The show follows two sets of characters: Lindsay, a pretty, bright girl who revolts against her role as a math whiz and starts hanging out with a bunch of freaks, and her geeky younger brother Sam, who longs in vain for the love of a cheerleader, a genuinely nice girl who regards him as an honorary girlfriend.

The remarkable thing about the show is how many characters are fully drawn and real to us. Lindsay's rebel crowd includes the James Deanish Daniel (who privately worries that he's dumb and going nowhere), Nick (who longs for Lindsay and rock music stardom), and Daniel's girlfriend, bad girl Kim (whose raw assertiveness masks a hypersensitivity to slights). Her former crowd includes the pathetic Millie, a rigidly good girl who doesn't understand why Lindsay's throwing her life away, but longs to keep on being friends.

Sam keeps hoping to be cool someday, a vain hope until he grows a bit. Cindy, the pretty cheerleader he longs for, in turn longs for a football player who doesn't seem to notice her. Sam's friend Bill, tall, skinny and uncoordinated, hates always being chosen last for teams in gym and dreams of someday making the saving play. Their friend Neal is sarcastic, surer of himself than the others, and clearer about the rules of high school society; one of their casual friends, a genius with electronics, helps out in the AV lab, and marches serenely to his own drummer.

Even the adults, though mostly viewed through the kids' eyes, have some depth and reality -- the school counselor, an aging ex-hippie who tries a little too hard to be with it, and yet turns out to have some useful things to say after all; the stereotypical gym teacher who, in a hilarious episode comes to understand that even the hopelessly unathletic geeks deserve to play too; Sam and Lindsay's parents who don't know how to deal with the way their kids are changing.

The truthfulness is in the broad outlines, not the details. Lindsay's rebellion is a safe one because these freaks are so improbably tame; they don't do drugs, just beer, sex, rock and roll, and bigtime attitude. But the larger truth is there: even among these kids who have opted out of the high school hierarchy, there is peer pressure, jockeying for position, and the terror that people will see through their careful poses.

We are reminded of how little kids understand about social dynamics. Lindsay, angry at the trouble her freaky friends have gotten her into, tries to go back to the Mathletes team and finds that it has not stood still waiting for her to come back. To fit back in, she has to displace somebody else, and that somebody is Millie. Brash though Lindsay has been, demanding her place on the team, she's still too nice to do that to her old friend. But she CAN'T go back to being what she used to be, because adapting to her freaky friends has changed her, enlarged her.

We watch these kids learn the same things we had to learn. Lindsay has to become surer of herself and less eager to please. She has to tell Nick she can't be his girlfriend (and he has to sooth his pride by convincing himself that he was the one who did the breaking up). Sam has to learn that cool is not in how you look but in your certain sense of self and your conviction that you matter.

The conversations are funny, but they have an absolute ring of truth. We see these kids trying to figure out what people mean, and what to say themselves. We see them joshing each other, tossing out teasing insults on purpose, and hurting people by accident because they're impatient and they still haven't quite figured out the rules. We watch them fumbling, and then trying to put things right.

Like most of us did, these kids are working their way through darkest adolescence with nothing but good intentions and the flickering flashlight of hope. They learn, as we did that growth is not comfortable, but staying in the same place is not possible. They learn to be kinder to each other, love each other better.

And along the way, they make us giggle. Not at them, but at our younger selves who come back to keep us company while we watch. It's easy to laugh at adolescence now -- after all, we have mended most of our broken places and made it through. We sit comfortably in our living room watching, knowing how much we learned from those same mistakes, knowing that we survived them.

Catch this show while you can. You'll understand it. You're not a network executive.