It's always (mostly) sunny at UNEC: How Undeclared started a new chapter for Freaks And Geeks crew

How do you follow up something perfect? It’s a very enviable and—one would assume—daunting question. And it was faced, in the late ’90s, by a few people who could be loosely be defined as working in the loosely defined realm of popular culture: directors like Wes Anderson, who would answer that query by widening his scope (and budget, color palette, ensemble, and number of carefully-constructed establishing shots and costumes); bands like Wilco, who would make the ambitious masterpiece that made their career, albeit one that ironically also got them dropped by their label for not being, to their ears, marketable; artists like Cat Power’s Chan Marshal, who would release one of the best covers after one the best two-chord songs ever; and writers like Kenneth Lonergan, who would use the Off-Broadway buzz he got from This Is Our Youth to make a remarkable debut film. 

Now, a TV show, obviously, is different and less personal-stampy than an album or a movie (or a book or what-have-you, to quote The Big Lebowski). But if there was one perfect series from this time—and one that had started and ended all too quickly and thus felt fully formed and consistently “complete”—it would have to be Freaks And Geeks, a beautifully bookended, “this-is-mine“-worthy obsession in a medium that, just by its nature (so many episodes, tight schedules, voices in the room, years over its run), doesn’t—can’t—have a lot of those. It was also incredibly real and hilariously and often painfully relatable. As The A.V. Club‘s Danette Chavez put in her One-Season Wonders on the 1999 NBC show: “Freaks And Geeks was a beacon to anyone whose high-school experience was awkward, boring, humbling, or painful—basically, anything other than the sexy and stylish depictions that had dominated teen-centered movies and shows.” 

In the case of Freaks And Geeks, and in particular, its executive producer and co-writer and -director, Judd Apatow, the answer to that question above—how do you follow up something perfect?—brought up another very obvious question. “And so when Undeclared started, when I was trying to find a way to get Amy [Poehler] involved,” explained Apatow in 2011 at the Paley Center For Media in Beverly Hills during a reunion of the show’s cast, “and I wanted to try retain as much of Freaks And Geeks as I could, I thought: Well, how old would they be next?” And thus a series, which you would not be wrong describing in a boiled-down-to-the-basics, caveman-uttered sort of way as “Freaks And Geeks but college but sitcom,” was born. 

And you really can’t talk about Undeclared, which kicked off its one and only season on Fox in September 2001, without talking about Freaks, if only because they share so much DNA. Geeks creator Paul Feig helmed the show’s fantastic second episode, “Oh, So You Have A Boyfriend?” (a half hour that, interestingly, had two versions—an initial one titled “Full Bluntal Nugety” had a whole lot more Ted Nugent—and involved reshoots, which you can read about in Erik Adams’ recaps); Seth Rogen, who was hired at just 18 years old, wrote for the show and starred as a main character; and director Jake Kasdan, who directed the most episodes of Freaks, also returned. In front of the camera, there were a ton of familiar faces, including Freaks And Geeks titular players such as Jason Segel, Busy Philipps, Martin Starr, and Samm Levine (very amusing as the frat president Books here), as well as Natasha Melnick, Steve Bannos, David Krumholtz, and Mark Allan Staubach (who played Sam’s dream-girl cheerleader Cindy Sanders, a stressed-out math teacher, Neal’s brother who’s enjoying college far more than high school, and that “Yeah, Ken, smash me a piece of that!” pot dealer, respectively) and drop-ins like Mike White (who was also a writer on Freaks).  

Unlike its spiritual predecessor, Undeclared is not a perfect show. It is, however, a great and very funny one—under or outside of the shadow of that cult darling that came before it—with a confident and reliable comedic rhythm that’s easy to both get sucked into and casually enjoy, like you’re lounging on that futon and sipping a can of Hamm’s while chuckling along to a story in your friend’s dorm room. But that is one tough act to follow, and it feels almost unfair to compare the two. Apatow’s series didn’t exactly conjure critical hosannas that it was “tender [and] achingly real,” to lift a pull quote from the back of Freaks‘ Shout! Factory DVD set—nor did it, from the outside, seem to aspire to. In his review of Undeclared: The Complete Series for The A.V.Club, Scott Tobias accurately summed it up as, comparatively, “a more easily digestible comedy about campus life.” This one doesn’t make you cry like, say, when Sam (John Francis Daley), after learning that his friend’s dad is cheating, hugs his own father (played by the late, great Joe Flaherty). That doesn’t mean it’s not moving or doesn’t touch on pain, and you may just well up just a bit when an insane diva of a boyfriend and his college-freshman girlfriend break up (a scene that, for some reason, hit harder during the rewatch for this piece).  

But Undeclared is definitely both literally and figuratively sunnier than Freaks, moving from the Michigan suburbs in the early ’80s to the “University Of Northeastern California” in modern times, with the occasional palm tree and steady sunshine that comes with filming parts of a TV show at UCLA. And it follows, essentially, two groups of newly arrived freshmen/roommates who go through classic college rites of passage. There’s Steven (Jay Baruchel, who, like Sam in Geeks, looks refreshingly and accurately quite young and acts, at first, accordingly awkward), a former high-school nerd and our POV character who is trying to reinvent himself as a cool, confident guy in college (and whose idea of flirting is, relatably, asking “Do you know this guy was in Election?” on what he thinks is a date); Lloyd (Charlie Hunnam, current star of Monster: The Ed Gein Story), a handsome British theater major who is actually a cool, confident guy (and who everyone wants to sleep with); Ron (Rogen), a bespectacled, overanalyzing smartass of a business major and Maxim magazine enthusiast; and the goofy Marshall (Timm Sharp), who is studying music unbeknownst to his parents, loves Beck, and (at least for this writer, who was also a college freshman in the fall of 2001) is the most reminiscent of dorm guys—or at least the ones you’d want to be around—of this time. And down the hall, there’s Lizzie (Carla Gallo), Steven’s love interest who’s girly and has that aforementioned crazy and clingy boyfriend; and Rachel (Monica Keena), Marshall’s kinda-but-not-really secret crush who is introduced as prone to panic attacks in the pilot but quickly becomes the saner and more independent voice of reason of the pair. (Later in the season, the new roommates are joined by a third, Christina Payano’s upbeat Tina, who is really into the song “How Bizarre.”) 

If that setup sounds male-centric, it is. As Gallo pointed out in that reunion, the show had only two female writers: Jenni Konner (who would go on to co-showrun the twentysomething, post-college series Girls, which was executive-produced by Apatow) and Alexandra Rushfield (who would collaborate with Apatow again as a scribe on the thirtysomething, more-into-the-real-world show Love). And the women’s storylines here—on the freshman 15, a bad dye job, ladies’ night, and the fight that erupts from replaying that 1996 OMC hit—often don’t have the gravity, perspective, or lived-in verisimilitude of those of their fellow co-eds on the floor, although there is a funny bit in which Rachel’s overstrict mother discovers a stuffed animal filled with her daughter’s condoms, smokes, and booze. Sure, it “ain’t the same fuckin’ ballpark” as 2003’s Old School, in which the only female-focused storyline that springs to mind is a blowjob class, but it’s worth noting—as is, come to think of it, that Adam Sandler (playing himself) sleeps with Lizzie.