So, Freaks and Geeks was aired in 1999-2000, but set in a US high school in the '80s. The school, McKinley High, is just as it sounds - your average school named after an assassinated president which has the strict teachers, the student counsellor who tries to 'relate', the jocks, the nerds, the cheerleaders and the others - the 'freaks', the burnouts who are aged 16 to 18 (played by James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Busy Phillips as Franco's girlfriend and Linda Cardellini, who was once a mathlete and now is rebelling a bit) and the 'geeks', Cardellini's younger brother Sam played by a young and adorable looking John Francis Daley and his two best friends Neil and Bill, played by Samm Levine and Martin Starr. Sam, Neil and Bill are the best portrayal of 14-year-old naivety, friendship and the struggles of high-school life.
Each character has a family, a back-story, and each is interesting in it's own right, but very simple stories of families struggling with money, adultery, trying to control their teenage children, trying to get along in society and keep up appearances. The two friendships groups have occassional cross-overs, from Franco giving Daley a porno film when the latter is confused about a joke about a boner, and Rogen confides in Daley in one of the last episodes about both of their troubles with their girlfriends. The two stereotypes of high-school student are beautifully explored, as Cardellini has to learn the harsh truth about parents not trusting you, about your friends being a bad influence, and whether they are worth the trouble you get in, and if the life you left behind is still there for you to return to. Equally, the geeks go through the immortal struggle of being bullied by jocks, being picked last for sport's teams and therefore never knowing their true potential on a baseball pitch, and realising that the things they all like - sci-fi shows and Bill Murray movies, ventriloquism, Dungeons and Dragons, rockets and chemical explosions - are dubbed as geeky and nerdy, but other people like those things too, so they don't need to stop being themselves to find friends. Eventually, they even find one of the burnouts likes playing D+D too, but they doubt that his influence will make D+D (and through extension, them) any more cool.
According to Busy Phillips, an article once wrote about how Freaks and Geeks was the anti-Dawson's Creek, and that you would not find good looking people in the cast of Freaks and Geeks. Of course, Busy would have found this confusing to read, as she starred in both, but obviously as a young adult at the time, took it mainly to be insulting.
Executively produced by Judd Apatow, who has since made many films with the cast (to counter-act the cancellation of the show, to continue both the characters and the actor's lives in his films), the show has a number of funny and surprising guest-stars. In an early episode we see an incredibly young Shia La Beouf playing the school mascot; in the last episodes of the show we meet Samaire Armstrong playing a Grateful Dead fan; Ben Stiller rocks up as the bouncer for the president (obviously you don't see the then-president Reagan); Leslie Mann, now Apatow's wife, plays a school teacher who Bill fancies, and interesting trivia reveals that some of the failed auditions of the parts were by Kaley Cuoco and Jesse Eisenberg !
It is funny, it is real, it says a lot about high school which is still highly relevant today. Its setting of 1980 only allows for pop-culture references, and does not really change any of the politics of social order. The notice of cancellation came after the airing of the episode Chokin' and Tokin', which is all about Bill being poisoned with a peanut (bless him) and Lindsay (Cardellini) trying weed for the first time, getting very red in the eyes, delirious etc, and having to go and baby sit a young boy. NBC obviously felt this episode took the truth and reality of high school too far - and felt that following this episode was the appropriate time to announce the cancellation, in case any complaints followed the content of the episode.