I just saw the movie "Lost and Delirious," which I
liked a lot for some of the same reasons I like
"Freaks and Geeks." It was a sympathetic look at
teenage passions, and the main characters were pretty
girls! (as are three of F&G's main characters, if you
include Cindy as a main character.) But one thing I
didn't like about "Lost and Delirious" is that it
ended with the central character committing suicide.
That's a cheap trick. It's an easy way to leave the
audience feeling moved. I also worry that such movie
scenes may encourage teenagers going through their own
painful dramas to kill themselves, particularly in
that the suicide in "Lost and Delirious" is a very
public grand gesture.

When I was in eighth grade, my English class was
assigned to write short stories, which were shared
with the class. In an exceptional number of them, the
main character ended up dead. That's how eighth
graders express deep feeling.

But we have a right to expect better from professional
writers, and we got it from the writers of "Freaks and
Geeks." They were able to find drama in the kinds of
events that really do create drama in the lives of
ordinary people -- starting to doubt your beliefs,
smashing up the family car, finding out that you're
not as good a drummer as you hoped you were, dressing
foolishly to try to impress someone, then coming to
regret it bitterly. To me, one of the most dramatic
scenes in the series is when Sam's parents are
pressing him to tell them who egged him, and he looks
at Lindsay and says something like, "Some dirtbags."
It's perfect. He doesn't turn her in, but he's
brutally frank about what he thinks of her.

I realize that some of this has to do with the
realities of making a TV show. You can't kill off
major characters most of the time, and you have to
deal with the network's ideas of what their audience
will accept. But this is another example of how those
practical pressures can help to produce quality
writing.

Alex