Forgotten Teen Dramedy Show on Prime Sitting on Pure 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score

Summary:

• There is a 1999 show, featuring the lives of teenagers in suburban America, with their different social statuses and drastically opposite interests.
• It won over fans' hearts with great characters, jokes and peculiar atmosphere.
• Besides, this series showed the whole world a bunch of promising young actors.

The 1990s TV series tended to depict only the lives of rich and popular high school students in New York and Los Angeles, neglecting to portray the routine of small towns’ teens.

This mistake was fixed by the 1999 one-season show, which now seems completely underviewed, despite its high scores and lots of positive public’s reviews.

This teen comedy drama revolves around Lindsay, a former good girl receiving only good grades and strictly following the rules, who after re-estimation of her values starts hanging out with a group of freaks. There she learns about their life, full of rebels, experiments with illegal substances, sex, betrayals and other so-called “cool” things.

At the same time, drawing a parallel to this, the show depicts Lindsay’s younger brother, Sam, and his geek friends, who are just beginning their way in high school. Their nerdy characters are drastically different from other students, which often leads them to comically awkward situations, through which they’re desperately trying to break.

Addressing a variety of important teen issues, including building friendships, dating, bullying, academic achievement and child-parent relationships, the series gained an iconic status of a show, which didn’t lose its relevance to our days at all.

Besides, it paved the way for many young actors to make careers in the cinema industry. This includes both the “freak” characters, which were portrayed by the now well-recognized actors, such as Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Busy Philipps and Jason Segel, and their younger colleagues, who played “geeks”.

As you may guess, we’re talking about the Freaks and Geeks show, which aired from 1999 to 2000, when it was canceled by NBC.

Created by the showrunners Paul Feig and Judd Apatow, it definitely set the new bar for teen shows due to its high level of acting, as well as casting, humor, characters’ lines and realistic portrayal of adolescence.

Those fans, who watched it long ago and then revised it later, admire its quality and meaning, which is still relatable in 2024.

“I was pleasantly surprised with just how well it held up all these years later,” as said in a Reddit discussion regarding this hidden gem.

Indeed, given today's dominance of shows like not-so-realistic Euphoria and Élite, it’d be quite a relief to binge Freaks and Geeks, which is available on Prime and Hulu .