Judd Apatow and Paul Feig Reveal That MTV Offered to Do a Second Season of FREAKS AND GEEKS and Why it Didn't Happen

Freaks and Geeks is a cult classic series with a huge fanbase despite the show only lasting one season. It was the launchpad for then-teen actors Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Martin Starr, Busy Phillips, Lizzy Caplan, and more, and it told the painful and hilarious coming of age story of a group of high-schoolers in the 1980s. It was such a good show, and fans have lamented for decades that it never got more seasons.

But according to series writer Judd Apatow, we could have gotten at least one more season. In a recent interview with Collider, Apatow revealed that after NBC canceled Freaks and Geeks, they got another offer:

“When the show was cancelled, there was an offer from MTV to continue making the show at a much lower budget. And we all decided we didn’t want to do a weaker version of the show.”

In the same interview, series creator Paul Feig revealed that the time surrounding the cancellation of the series was filled with personal struggles as well that clouded his ability to deal with the changes:

“It was a weird time for me because my mom died two days before we got cancelled. So I was a little out of sorts, but I remember hearing that [MTV offered to pick us up]. We probably just had to lose so much stuff and music and budgets. We were already always strained on our budget as it was.”

The music was a huge part of the show, with it being a specific period in time, and following high schoolers who loved music so much. A budget cut may have also impacted the returning cast, and the ensemble was also such an impactful part of the story. Feig continued:

“I was so thrown and we'd worked so hard on that show. I mean, you say it looked like a movie, that's really how we treated it. So, we were ready to drop at the end of those 18 episodes. And then my mom dies, and I think I had a moment of like, ‘I can't even deal with any of this.’ And then very quickly after the decisions were made, then you're kind of like, ‘Oh my God, what did we do? Could we have pulled it off if we had done it?’”

He went on to imagine what could have been if the series went on, but also talked about the beauty of the single season:

“There's moments so many times I go like, 'Wow, we just got away with these 18 episodes,' and I'm sure we would've done other great episodes, another great season. But at the same time, it's set in amber now and there's something lovely about that.”

When talking about how the season ended, he added:

“People always go, ‘Oh, it's so sad you never got to end the series.’ It's like, ‘Well, we did end the series.’ That whole episode was about how everybody gets put on a different path. And we do that at the end of the series because it's like when you graduate high school, you don't know where half the people you went to high school with go. I've always said the only true final episode for a show ever was Six Feet Under because it showed how each one of the characters died.”

It really was a great show, and while I am one of the people who would have loved to have seen another season, that one season really does stand on its own.