HOLLYWOOD – Seven years ago, with NBC frantic about losing its prime-time crown to ABC and ABC’s game-show smash “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” executives yanked one of their most critically acclaimed but low-rated shows, a bittersweet comedy-drama of 1980s high-school life called “Freaks and Geeks.”
Now, with “Freaks and Geeks” an enduring cult hit on DVD, its creators are exacting a revenge of sorts at the movie theater.
Next week, as the annual TV-pilot season hits full swing, specialty outfit ThinkFilm will release “The TV Set,” writer-director Jake Kasdan’s industry satire. “The TV Set” stars David Duchovny as a neurotic series creator beset by enemies of his creative vision, most notably an overbearing network boss, played by Sigourney Weaver, whose proudest achievement is a pandering reality smash titled “Slut Wars.”
It may not be entirely coincidental that Kasdan directed the pilot for “Freaks and Geeks.” Or that the film’s executive producer is Judd Apatow, director of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” who also happened to supervise a long-ago series called … “Freaks and Geeks.”
Kasdan, son of film director Lawrence Kasdan, plays down the notion that his film sprang directly from the “Freaks” fiasco. The script “is all based on my experience, but not directly on one specific experience,” he said recently.
On the other hand, it’s not hard to tell how much of the script research was conducted. “The TV Set” is “a collage, an exaggerated version of what he went through working on television,” Apatow said of Kasdan, an old friend.
That process is unfolding right now in editing suites around town. The film’s timing is propitious; the frantic buzz and self-serving gossip about which real-life pilot projects the network suits love or hate is beginning to build and should be at fever pitch by the time Kasdan’s film hits theaters Friday.
“I was watching all my friends go through it,” Kasdan said, “and the same problems would arise in virtually every project. … There would be an argument about casting and about whatever the darkest element of the story is.”
Duchovny – bearded, tubby and nearly unrecognizable from his days on Fox’s “The X-Files” – is in a slump as Mike Klein, a neurotic writer who’s struggling to preserve his artistic vision for a bittersweet comic drama partly based on his brother’s suicide.
His key battle is with Lenny (the ever-formidable Weaver) over the casting of a male lead whose performances resemble a cruise-ship entertainer doing a Matthew Perry impersonation. Lenny has another problem, of course: Does the brother have to commit suicide?
Even the title of Klein’s labor of love undergoes wrenching change, from “The Wexler Chronicles” to the focus-group-friendly “Call Me Crazy!”
Neither Apatow nor Kasdan currently are working in TV.
Apatow said he’d consider making another series, maybe for cable, but has otherwise bid farewell to TV: “I couldn’t figure out how to navigate it.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
