TTH 4/7/26
Freaks and Geeks Rewatch - Beers and Weirs
Much like the follow-up to a great debut album, the second episode of a show which had a spectacular pilot episode feels crucial. It’s quite common for a show to fail to live up to the promise of its pilot. There were no such worries with Freaks & Greeks. Episode #2 still had the vibes of a show feeling its way out, but it took a standard plot - let’s throw a house party while the parents are out of town - and made it feel fresh.
Part of this is due to the small touches contained in the episode, many of which have a 1980 specificity, but they help establish the setting without making the show look like too much of a museum exhibit. Bill is shown thumbing through an issue of Cracked magazine. Lindsay stacks up some 8-track tapes in preparation for the party. Sam has a Steve Martin poster on his bedroom door. These moments demonstrate how much care Paul Feig and Judd Apatow put into this show.
The Weir parents were going out of town for a few days, and Lindsay convinces them that since she is mature enough to babysit for other families, why can’t she be trusted to watch over Sam & the house? They finally agree, but Lindsay quickly makes the mistake of mentioning to the freaks that the house is going to be free of parental supervision for a few days. Time to throw a kegger! It doesn’t take long for word to spread, and not only is much of the school looking forward to the party, but Daniel has also invited a few adults to attend. Adults as in middle aged men who don’t seem to think it’s a big deal that they are drinking with a bunch of high school kids.
By chance this coincided with a drunk driving sketch performed at a school assembly. This throws Sam into a full blown panic. If people drink at our house, someone is bound to die. He desperately tries to convince Lindsay to cancel, but even if she wanted to, it’s too late. Doing so would make her look lame in front of her new friends. The geeks come up with a perfect solution. Swap out the keg with one filled with non-alcoholic beer. After they twist Neil’s arm into using some of his bar mitzvah money to pay for it, they purchase the keg. Neil, who confesses to his friends that he has had a lifelong crush on Lindsay, distracts her while Sam and Bill make the swap.
Teenage crushes play a big part this week. In addition to Neil pining on Lindsay, Nick’s crush on Lindsay grows more obvious. Nick is particularly down in the dumps because John Bonham has just died, and Lindsay’s suggestion that Led Zeppelin can simply find a new drummer didn’t help things much. Lindsay, on the other hand, thinks that she finally has a shot with Daniel, being that he and Kim have just broken up.
It’s finally party time. (I have to say that I watched this in a semi-panic out of fear that someone would break a precious object in the Weir house. Luckily, nothing bad happened, partially due to the fact that Sam was safely removing anything that looked delicate.) Bill was placed on keg guard duty. He at first refused to attend - Friday nights are for watching Dallas on TV - but he was convinced that he could watch Dallas alone in Sam’s room, the hiding place for the real keg. Meanwhile, the Placebo Effect was in full throttle. The party guests were gradually beginning to stumble around and slur their words even though no one was drinking a drop of alcohol. Everyone except Bill that is. The keg proved to be too tempting. After first taking a few clandestine sips from the tap, he soon started filling up one of those mini-helmets used for ice cream sundaes and downing a few beers.
And now it was time for teenage heartbreak. Lindsay walks in on Daniel and Kim taking a tumble in her bed - it seems that they regularly break up and then reconcile every other week - and soon finds herself in Nick’s arms. He attempts to console her and offers to help her with the cleanup. And then, he starts to unstrap her bra. Lindsay backs away before anything happens, and Nick is embarrassed by his poor reading of signals. Lindsay is near tears as she sees guests collecting money so that they can purchase another keg; things are officially out of control. Neil makes things right - at first he tells her about the feelings he has for her, which don’t appear to register. She is “drunk” after all. He then phones the police pretending to be a neighbor complaining about the noise. Everyone leaves, no damage is done to the house, and crucially, no one is drunk. Except for Bill.
There were a few nice character beats seen here as well. Lindsay’s old mathlete friend Millie entered the party with a judgmental air about her. She decides to set everyone straight by taking a seat at the family piano and performing Jesus Is Just All Right. Nick misses the point and joins her for a duet, he just thinks of it as a Doobie Brothers song and not as a message. Ken is the only one who seems to recognize that the beer has no alcohol, so he takes advantage of that by winning a small fortune playing quarters. The episode also recognizes that Lindsay has only just started hanging out with the freaks so they don’t know her very well yet. Ken had no clue that Lindsay and Sam are siblings.
Beers and Weirs passed the crucial test; this is not a flash in the pan show with a strong pilot and nothing else. Creatively it was all smooth sailing ahead. The show’s best days are still yet to come.
On To Springfield
9 new individuals and teams have officially been named as members of the Class of 2026 set for induction into the Naismith Hall Of Fame this summer. As a periodic reminder, class sizes are as large as they are not because it is easy to get into this Hall, but because the pool of candidates is drawn from an assortment of basketball populations: the NBA, college ball, women’s hoops, the international game and even the occasional high school coach. Without further ado, this year’s honorees are:
1996 US Women’s Olympic Team - They were one of the most important teams in history. For the first time USA Basketball had built a team which played together for a full year before the Olympics and therefore were a well-oiled machine by the time of the Games and they romped to an easy gold medal. Their success and popularity made the WNBA possible. Half of the roster (Teresa Edwards, Lisa Leslie, Rebecca Lobo, Katrina McClain, Dawn Staley, & Sheryl Swoopes) had previously been inducted as individuals, now the remainder of the roster joins them.
Joey Crawford - It remains my contention that the Hall has inducted too many referees. Even though I estimate that Crawford has officiated somewhere in the vicinity of 74% of the games that I have watched in my lifetime, I still feel that way. Good for him, though, despite my feelings I’m not gonna rain on anyone’s parade.
Mike D’Antoni - He is being inducted as a contributor, so look past his NBA coaching record. He had a decent record, and put together some innovative offenses, but his main claim to fame was that he was instrumental in constructing the infrastructure of basketball in Italy.
Elena Delle Donne - Injuries cut her career short, but she accomplished a lot in a relatively short amount of time. She was a Rookie of the Year, a 2-time MVP, and won a WNBA championship with the Washington Mystics. She was also a classic big fish in a small pond in her college days. She initially committed to UConn but found the atmosphere overwhelming and transferred to Delaware to play volleyball instead. Her love of basketball was eventually renewed, and she went on to star at Delaware. It’s difficult to imagine a player of her caliber remaining at a school such as Delaware in the NIL era, so her career already feels like a throwback.
Mark Few - We have seen this story dozens of times. A relatively unknown school makes a surprise run in the NCAA tournament, after which the head coach moves to a large conference school and his old school falls back into obscurity. After Gonzaga’s “the slipper still fits” run into the Elite Eight the script held up to a point; Dan Monson jumped ship to Minnesota. Assistant Few took over, and he built upon that foundation; the Zags have not missed the tournament since. Building and maintaining a program from nothing into a perennial powerhouse is an impressive accomplishment indeed.
Chamique Holdsclaw - She was well on her way to becoming one of the greatest winners in the sport’s history. After playing on the premiere high school team in the nation for all 4 years, she was the best player on Tennessee teams which won titles in her first 3 years. Her pro career felt like a minor disappointment by comparison, but she won Rookie of the Year in addition to Olympic gold. Most importantly she was one of the earliest athletes to publicly speak out on mental health challenges. Anyone who has taken strides to erode some of that stigma has saved lives.
Candace Parker - She was the easiest call among this year’s class, being that she is a GOAT level star. A two time NCAA Final Four MOP, a two time WNBA MVP - which includes her rookie year in which she won the ROY/MVP double - a three time WNBA champion, a two time Olympic gold medalist. This only scratches the surface of her accolades.
Doc Rivers - I am a little ambivalent about Doc’s credentials. As impressive as his coaching career appears on the surface - he is currently in 6th place on the all-time NBA victories list and he led the Celtics to a championship in 2008 - I always got the sense that his teams have underachieved in the playoffs. There have been too many series losses in which his teams have held 3-1 leads. Still, it is hard to argue against that many wins.
Amar’e Stoudemire - This one was a mild surprise. He was a legitimately great player when he was with the high scoring Phoenix Suns in the first half of his career, winning Rookie of the Year and making 6 All-Star games. He took a downturn when he left Phoenix; he made one final ASG in his first season with the Knicks, but otherwise the back half of his career wasn’t much to write home about. The Basketball Hall does tend to reward players with high peaks, but if it were up to me I would support someone such as Shaun Marion or LaMarcus Aldridge ahead of Stoudemire.
50 Years Ago - Alice
The Oscar winning movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was a serious character study about a woman with a pre-adolescent son who starts a new life for herself as she travels to California in pursuit of a singing career. Alice, the long-running sitcom loosely based on the movie, was many things. A serious character study was not one of those things.
It was a standard broadly based sitcom emblematic of its time. The show was set in Phoenix, more specifically in Mel’s Diner, the truck stop where Alice (Linda Lavin) worked along with her fellow waitresses, sassy Flo (Polly Holliday) and dim-witted Vera (Beth Howland.) Mel (Vic Tayback) was a raging inferno of fury in a sitcommy way; he always seemed to be on the verge of wanting to pulverize his staff but of course the show would only go so far. A borderline abusive character in a movie is one thing; if you want to invite an antagonistic character into America’s living room each week he has to be at least somewhat likable. The ensemble was completed with Alice’s son Tommy (Phillip McKeon) along with the usual array of regular customers who appeared over the years. It was also the sort of diner in which assorted celebrities would magically appear from time to time. Everyone from George Burns to Desi Arnaz to Telly Savalas popped in at various points.
I’m not going to harp on this show’s reliance on catch phrases such as “kiss my grits” or Mel calling Vera “dingy!” Instead I’ll point out another overused sitcom trope found in this show. A stupid character can provide solid comedy; a character who is so stupid that one wonders how this person can possibly function in society takes things too far. Vera was one such character. In the movie Vera was flighty; in the TV show she was implausibly dumb.
Polly Holliday left around halfway through the series’ 9 season run when Flo got her own spin-off show. She was briefly replaced by a similar character portrayed by Diane Ladd - who had played Flo in the movie, but she only stuck around for a brief period. (BTW, Tayback was the only actor from the movie who reprised his role on the TV series.) The permanent replacement for Flo was yet another southern fried waitress, this one named Jolene, who in the end appeared in as many episodes as Flo did. Here is a fact that I only just now discovered. Part of Jolene’s back story was that she was related to Boss Hogg, who appeared in an episode which firmly established that Alice and The Dukes Of Hazzard were both part of the same extended universe.
When I was a kid I too often fell prey to regularly watching TV shows not because I liked them, but because they happened to be on. Alice was a show that I watched an awful lot of episodes of, even though I kind of hated it. If I had a time machine I would go back and encourage my younger self to change the channel.
Closing Laughs
And so, it is time to draw the curtain for today. Hope you are all doing well. Have a fantastic day, and be sure to stop by again on Thursday.
