TWO YEARS AGO, the NBC TV show “Freaks and Geeks” came in under the radar—and basically stayed under the radar until it crashed into the mountains. A year later, reruns of the show’s 18 episodes on the Fox Family Channel finally set radar screens tingling, and folks who’d missed the series entirely the first time around discovered something remarkable: a blindingly funny yet emotionally harrowing comedy-drama that captured high school life as nothing else on television ever had. Its cast has moved on, and “Undeclared,” the new half-hour college comedy from “Freaks and Geeks” producer Judd Apatow is, at least around here, the most hotly anticipated show of the year. Apatow called Modern Humorist from his car to talk about “Undeclared,” “Freaks and Geeks” and why failure is always an option. Note: This is an actual interview with Judd Apatow, not a parody of an interview.
MODERN HUMORIST:		In a way it feels odd to me that the cast of “Freaks and Geeks” are actually actors and not people I went to high school with, because I swear I went to high school with some of those people.
JUDD APATOW:		Well, most of them are playing characters, but the characters are based on the writers’ observations of who the actors really are. So when something would happen on the set or we would notice the dynamic between the actors, we would write it into the show. So we would notice that the kid who plays Neil, Samm Levine, would annoy the other geeks with his dumb jokes. So as you watch the episodes you see the other geeks getting more and more hostile toward Neil, because we noticed that he was driving them crazy a lot of the time. We also noticed that John Daley seemed to be blossoming into a handsome young kid and that he would naturally gravitate away from his friends, and so we built that into the show.
MH:		It’s also just very unusual to see such verisimilitude on TV. Did you have to put up a fight to establish that? To get actors who didn’t look like TV stars and plots that are all about humiliation and awkwardness?
JA:		Well, the show wasn’t “developed” — Paul [Feig] just wrote a draft of it and then showed it to me, and I set it up at Dreamworks and then sold it to NBC, and they loved the script, so it was very clear from the moment of sale what we wanted to do. The teen show craze was at its peak and people were beginning to get irritated with it, so the time was right for a show that went the other way, so we decided to cast a high school show with kids that actually looked like high school students, and sadly that was seen as something original. But it wasn’t to us. We didn’t think it was that daring a concept to have actors look like what they play. But that’s something that you don’t see on TV because TV executives think that TV is an escape for people. In movies it’s not a big deal. That’s why there are movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Welcome to the Dollhouse, which were some of my inspirations in terms of the tone of the show.
MH:		I think that when I was a high school freshman I looked a lot like Sam only with worse hair. Who from the show were you most like?
JA:		There’s a piece of how I see myself as a high school student in Nick, in the way he obsesses over Lindsay and embarrasses himself by singing “Lady” by Styx. That’s the kind of thing I would do. I might not sing Styx, but I would do something that over the top, and I would fail. I’m a big comedy fan as was Paul. We were both obsessed with Steve Martin and “Saturday Night Live.” All of those things were peaking at the time we were in high school, so we made Neil’s character really into comedy. All of the geeks are really into comedy.
MH:		There’s that great scene with Bill watching Garry Shandling.
JA:		When I was a kid I used to go home every day and my friends would play sports. While they would have football practice, I would watch the Dinah Shore show and the Mike Douglas show and the early “Love Connection,” and I would make a grilled-cheese sandwich and chocolate cake, and I would watch TV straight through until Letterman was over at 1:30 in the morning. In high school! And I did that way too often. And that’s my most personal moment on the show. There’s a little bit of that everywhere. An enormous amount of the stories happened to Paul. Paul was afraid to take a shower after gym class. Paul would buy a gift for a girl. Like when Sam bought Cindy Sanders the necklace — that was a Paul move. All the writers contributed these horror stories from their youth, and we put them into the show. Most of it happened to someone on the show.
MH:		It happened to all of us. You know, they show two episodes in a row on the Fox Family Channel and I can’t watch two episodes in a row because I have to get up after an episode, and walk around and shake it off.
JA:		That may be why we weren’t successful.
MH:		A lot of people are hoping “Undeclared” is going to be “Freaks and Geeks” goes to college. Is it?
JA:		I don’t think it is. “Undeclared” is more of a comedy. It’s shot in the same style as “Freaks and Geeks.” But it’s much faster paced, and it’s not trying to reveal the most painful parts of your adolescence, because that’s not what college was. College for most people is a reward for surviving high school. I mean, I was a geek in high school. When I went to college, I learned how the real world worked, and I didn’t have as many social obstacles. In college most of the kids are accepting. You can find yourself playing a game of quarters with guys on the football team, and they would be nice to you. The show is more about what kids do when they are given freedom and responsibility at the same time. What do kids do when they have to go to class but no one is taking attendance. The show is similar to “Freaks and Geeks” because it is about a former geek going to college and trying to change his reputation. It’s how a collection of very different people figure out how to get along in a dorm space.
MH:		Following “Freaks and Geeks”—which I think was simultaneously one of the best shows that’s ever been on television and also, for whatever reason, not a success—are you under two different kinds of pressure with “Undeclared,” to create a show that’s just as good and also that performs better?
JA:		I created “Undeclared” with the intention of wanting people to watch it, much more so than “Freaks and Geeks.” “Freaks and Geeks,” we thought if it was pure, people would love it. We thought, like, there would be a backlash against these high school shows, and that if one was more honest, people would run to it in droves, and we were very surprised that we weren’t a gigantic hit. As we shot more and more shows, we realized we wouldn’t survive, so we approached the show like it was an 18-hour miniseries, and we literally didn’t change one frame of film to please anybody at the network or the production company, because we felt like our fate had already been decided so why not make something as good as we can make it? With “Undeclared” it’s different because I think we have a shot to survive. And I’d like to figure out a way to get people to watch something that I do. It doesn’t mean I make any concessions, because I don’t, but I am aware of trying to entertain people. But not in a way that’s different than when we did “The Larry Sanders Show.” We tried to make the show as funny as we could. That being said, I don’t have any belief that it’s gonna explode through the roof, because it still has enough weird, dark, odd comedy to make it a long shot.
MH:		What can you tell me about the basic setup? You said the central character is a former geek coming to college.
JA:		In the first scene he’s talking to his geeky friend and he says he decided to go to college because he grew six inches senior year, and he feels like he’s looking good now, he’s gained some weight, he’s filling out, and no one knows who he is in college, he can be whoever he wants to be. In the pilot story his dad shows up and tells him that his mother wants a divorce from him, and it’s about trying to enjoy your first day of school when you find out your parents are going to get divorced. [pause] I guess that’s not much lighter than “Freaks and Geeks.”
MH:		If you can wring humor out of that, it sounds like it’s going to get off to a good start.
JA:		And there are some pure comedic episodes about what happens when all of the kids get their first credit cards and what they spend the money on. Steven decides to buy term papers from this speed freak in town, played by Will Ferrell, and the show’s about what happens when Will Ferrell doesn’t get him good grades. So there’s some funny episodes, but they all have a good heart, I hope—that is my intention. I’m always trying to do something original. The cast is really funny. But we are definitely going for comedy much more than “Freaks and Geeks.” “Freaks and Geeks” was funny, whatever, half the time. This tries to be funny most of the time. But funny in a James Brooks, Broadcast News kind of way.
MH:		One thing about shows that are set in high school and college—are you setting yourself a four year limit? And do you have to think from the beginning how you’re going to extend it beyond that?
JA:		I kind of feel like it probably won’t even say what year they’re in much. I don’t think I’ll track them from freshman year to sophomore. I’ll probably just let it be one long year until the end of the series. But I never believe that any of these shows are going to last very long, so I don’t think about it too much. If it happens, I’ll deal with it, but in the beginning I always assume failure—it makes it all easier to handle.
		Where is the cast of Freaks and Geeks today?