Thank God We Never Got ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Season 2

Some things in life are just better off being left alone, like a slightly screwed-up sandwich order or a bad zit. The first (and only) season of Paul Feig‘s Freaks and Geeks is just about as close to perfect as they come—and they don’t come around that often. The series came crashing into the atmosphere in 1999, depicting a group of high schoolers in the early 1980s who felt as real as a punch to the jaw.

It’s easy for an audience to get greedy, and with a show like Freaks and Geeks, it’s tough to not wish that there had been seven seasons of a series that was this good. As an audience, we keep digging our hands deeper into the popcorn bowl because we can’t possibly imagine a world where our favorite show isn’t airing, though that can come with a double-edged sword when a series starts to feel like it’s just going through the motions. Given the odd ending of Freaks and Geeks, we might actually have been lucky when it was canceled after the first season.

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What a Season 2 of ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Might Have Looked Like

The thing is, not every show needs a second season — or a third, or a fourth — and there’s something to be said for a series so perfect that it doesn’t need anything else to hold it up. In the same way that some people are still begging for another season of Brad Ingelsby‘s Mare of Easttown, Freaks and Geeks is stronger alone: both are the reasons why sayings like, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and “Be careful what you wish for,” exist.

But for a second, let’s pretend that we were, in fact, granted another season of Freaks and Geeks. Basing things purely off of the finale of the first season, there’s a fairly good chance that the show wouldn’t have been able to sustain its almost-perfect record. If the hard rock-obsessed Nick Andopolis (Jason Segel) is capable of getting into disco and Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) is completely fine with throwing away her future prospects to follow around The Grateful Dead on tour, it’s tough to even think about what this second season would’ve entailed.

What direction would you even take the show with an ending like that? “Ripple” by The Grateful Dead fades out and then…what? Lindsay realizes that she’s made a terrible mistake (and actually hates The Grateful Dead) halfway down the street and demands to turn the bus around? Nick breaks an ankle on the dance floor and — while in recovery — decides to get serious about his drumming career?

At that point, Freaks and Geeks would’ve gone down in history as one of those perfectly great shows that got destroyed by a second season. We’d be doomed to spend the rest of our days recommending the series with the precursor, “Well, the first season was incredible, but everything after that sucked.” And with that, this fictional second season just totally besmirched the entire series in one fell swoop.

‘Freaks and Geeks’ Paid the Price of Being Real

Freaks and Geeks was never trying to be something it wasn’t — it didn’t sugar coat things, and it certainly didn’t put on airs. It’s as honest a depiction of high school as they come; there was a profound realness to it, and many times, it was the simpler, small things that made the bigger picture feel so relatable. Unlike the more flamboyant TV shows of today that are host to students with seemingly unlimited, over-curated closets, Lindsay and Kim Kelly (Busy Philipps) rolled up to school each day in the same jackets they always did — and most of our high school selves did the exact same thing.

While the wardrobe certainly added to the look and feel of the series, Freaks and Geeks tackled some serious topics for a show that was technically “just about” high school. Marriage infidelity, being intersex, and the painfulness of fitting (and not fitting) in were all explored throughout the series, a stark contrast to other television shows of the era that were focused on the more lighthearted aspects of life. The honesty of the series is what made it a cult hit, as those seemingly more “out there” topics were all things that high schoolers actually dealt with.

In many ways, the series’ dedication to being honest is what led Freaks and Geeks to not getting renewed in the first place, but in that same sense, we almost have to thank the producers and writers for staying true to themselves. Without that, we might’ve actually gotten a second season of the show. Instead, we get to hold a perfectly formed diamond in our hands, one that’s filled with grit, gut punches, and non-alcoholic beer kegs.