Freaks and Geeks Rewind: The Little Things

Spoilers for the penultimate episode of "Freaks and Geeks," "The Little Things," coming up just as soon as I get people to stay away from those cans...

Behold, the episode that launched a comedy empire. Sort of.

"The Little Things" was the episode that convinced Judd Apatow that Seth Rogen was a man he wanted to keep working with, which in turn led to him hiring Rogen as both actor and writer on "Undeclared," which in turn led to Rogen showing him the "Superbad" script he wrote with his childhood best friend, which in turn led to Rogen getting cast in "40-Year-Old Virgin," etc., etc., etc. I'm not saying that Apatow wouldn't be Hollywood's reigning Comedy God without Rogen, but the two men definitely bring out the best in each other.

But we'll get back to that. I want to kick off this look at "The Little Things" with the story that carries over from the previous episode: Sam's doomed relationship with Cindy Sanders.

A fair amount of time seems to have passed since "Smooching and Mooching," enough that Bill can later refer to his Seven Minutes in Heaven in a "Did I ever tell you about that time?" way to Neal. We open up with Cindy dining with the Weirs, Cindy kissing up to Harold with her talk about being a young Republican (George H.W. Bush, then the VP, is due to speak at McKinley High, and she gets to introduce him) and her hatred of poor people. Sam, in turn, is already learning to hate her. At school, he now eats at the popular kids' table, while the other geeks look on resentfully. (Harris as Yoda: "Once you start down that dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.") Cindy continues to prove herself to be judgmental and manipulative, first by insulting a rival school's cheerleaders for being ugly, then trying to goad Sam into fighting Todd. Sam still hasn't quite grasped that Cindy is definining him only in comparison to Todd, but Todd gets it and tells Cindy that he likes Sam too much to beat him up.

After school, Sam complains to Bill and Neal that Cindy's boring, and only wants to make out. (Neal, predictably: "I'd kill to be that boring.") Bill suggests that Sam take Cindy on a real date to do something that he wants to do instead of one of her ideas, and when Sam is skeptical about Cindy's desire to do something that Sam enjoys, Bill the wise man asks, "Then why are you going out with her?" (Neal the horndog: "Because she's a goddess!")

So Sam gets Cindy's permission to take her on a date of his own design (because it's that kind of relationship that he needs permission), and we get our final glimpse of the collected geeks' views on dating. Gordon adopts an awful British accent and suggests a Broadway show of some kind. Bill suggests a screening of "The Jerk" (no doubt he remembers how it helped him get over with Vicki), and when Neal insists that that's not a romantic movie, Harris counters, "Laughter is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Get a woman laughing, you get a woman loving." The matter of the locale having apparently been settled, they turn to a discussion of the appropriate gift, and Sam asks Harris what he gets for the much-discussed but rarely-seen Judith. Unfortunately, he's no use -- Judith wants only scented oils "and time with her man" -- so Sam turns to his mom. Jean, beaming at the idea of her son becoming a man (and that he still wants her counsel in a way that Lindsay doesn't), gets out an heirloom necklace from her mother, positive that Cindy will love it. (Clearly, she hasn't been paying attention when Cindy comes over for dinner.)

And then, disaster on every level. At the movie theater, Cindy hates the necklace, both because it's old and not her style, and because Sam didn't spend any money on it. (With Cindy, it's not the thought that counts.) But you know what she hates even more? "The Jerk." While Sam is laughing uproariously at the legendary "He hates these cans!" scene, Cindy's putting on the lemon face to end all lemon faces. Sam notices Cindy's displeasure and offers to buy her popcorn. "Will popcorn make this movie funnier?" she asks, her voice dripping with scorn. This in turn pisses off Sam so obviously that even Cindy realizes she's gone too far with her boytoy, so she tries to distract him with a hickey, which only annoys him more. (Nothing like a girl you've grown to loathe trying to give you a hematoma.)

Later that night, Sam tells Lindsay about this awful date, and when he mentions that Cindy hated "The Jerk," Lindsay knows her brother enough to say "Uh-oh." "What's wrong with me?" Sam asks. "She's so pretty; why don't I like her?" Lindsay explains that not all attractive people are cool, and that he should break up with her. Sam's afraid to do this because people already can't believe Cindy's willing to date him; what will they think of him if he dumps her? (Dude, did you not see "Can't Buy Me Love?" That's the whole premise. Oh, wait... seven years down the road. Sorry.) Lindsay, speaking from very painful experience, tells him that he can't keep dating someone he doesn't like.

Sam shows up for school the next day wearing a baggy turtleneck, the better to hide Cindy's love mark. Neal is deeply offended that Sam would be willing to break up with such a hot girl, and refuses to believe that a hot girl could be uncool. After Sam pukes out his courage and has a men's room chat with Ken (more on that below), he mans up and approaches Cindy, who immediately confirms his feelings by barking "What the hell is that?" at the sight of his hickey-hiding turtleneck. When he counters that she won't wear the heirloom necklace, she spits, "It was ugly!" She tries to get out of this fight because she needs to go introduce Vice-President Bush, but Sam's not going to let her wriggle off the hook. Sam tells her that he doesn't want to date her anymore, and would rather go back to being friends.

"No, Sam," she tells him in complete disbelief. "You can't break up with me. You're supposed to be nice. That's the only reason I'm going out with you in the first place!" Sam points out that he, in fact, is a nice guy, but they have nothing in common and they're not having any fun. Cindy admits this is true, but she can't deal with the humiliation of being dumped by her nerdy rebound guy, so she throws the necklace at him and storms off. (Our final glimpse -- ever -- of Ms. Sanders is her all red-eyed and unrecognizable as she introduces a future Commander in Chief.) Neal and Bill wander over for moral support, and Neal's enough of a friend to tell Sam he did the right thing. Bill asks if this means Sam will go back to eating lunch with them, and when Sam says yes, Bill says, "Thank God."

Can I just say how much I love the turn this story took? Whatever plausibility issues people may have had with Cindy asking Sam out in the first place, this is pretty much how the story should have gone once they went out, even if it was completely unexpected. Any other show would have had Cindy turn out to be awesome, or else would have had her be the dumper, not the dumpee. It's not even that she's a bad person, just spoiled and a little selfish. But she's a terrible match for Sam, and he was too blinded by her looks to realize that until he got to spend a lot of up close and personal time with her. (The idea of the cheerleader goddess not being the perfect woman is something the writers from "Ed" could have really learned from; I kept waiting for that show's hero to realize that his dream girl from high school was a fairly dull adult.) Some great squirmy comedy performed by both John Daley and Natasha Melnick.

The episode's other relationship story is even squirmier and more unexpected, as Ken has to wrestle with the discovery that Amy was, as he puts it so memorably to Daniel and Nick, born with both the gun and the holster.

Things have seemingly been going great with Amy since they hooked up back in "The Garage Door," and the only source of stress in their lives is Amy's nervousness about having to play "Hail to the Chief" at the Bush assembly. ("There's a lot of tuba," she notes.)

While hanging out in her bedroom for a "study" session, Ken opens up about his distant relationship with his parents -- they're not bad people, but "I guess raising me wasn't one of the things they learned in college" -- and how he's closer with his nanny. Amy in turn decides it's time to let Ken in on her deepest secret and explains that, "When I was born, I had the potential to be male or female." Ken, confused, says, "Yeah, me too." And so she delicately walks him through the concept of being born with ambiguous genitalia, and how her parents and the doctors decided the best thing would be to make her a girl.

Ken, not surprisingly, doesn't know how to respond to this. "No... This is good... that you told me... this," he tells her, trying to play cool. He acts reassured when she tells him that she's all-girl now, but when they bump into each other in school the next day, he engages in clumsy small talk and then makes a point of hugging her instead of kissing her. Later, she confronts him directly, and he gets more and more worked up about his inability to do anything to change this situation. "It's over, move on," he insists. She says it's not that easy, that there will always be a part of her that's...

"... a guy?" Ken asks, and Amy brushes him off.

That night, the male freaks are sleeping over in Nick's basement. Ken declares that he's going to break up with Amy, and when Daniel and Nick protest, he explains about the gun and holster situation. Nick seems appeased by news of Amy's long-ago surgery making her into a girl, but Daniel -- in maybe his harshest moment of the series (if he's not goofing around, and Franco plays the scene so oddly that it's hard to tell) -- says "I don't think it works that way. I think you better get rid of her." Ken realizes he doesn't want to break up with her, he "might even love her." Daniel asks if that means Ken's gay, and Ken angrily replies, "I don't know, does it?" Daniel insists he was joking (or was he?), but now it's all Ken can think about.

Ken needs advice, and tries to get some from Mr. Rosso, but only after explaining that he assumed Rosso was gay. Rosso (already suffering a lot of indignities that week; for more, see below) then turns the counseling session into an interrogation to figure out why Ken might think that of him, and Ken quickly bolts for yet another half-baked attempt to figure out which way he swings. First he puts on a David Bowie record, then some heavy metal, then a disco album to see which one he responds best to. When that (shockingly) fails to provide a concrete answer, he pulls out two nudie mags, one featuring men, one women, and studies them intensely. Rogen's reactions throughout are priceless. (If I had to guess which moment during the episode made the lightbulb go off above Apatow's head, I'd pick the filming of this sequence.)

The freaks are hanging around at night, and Ken reads way too much into Daniel greeting him and Amy with "Hey, guys," demanding to know what Daniel meant by that and then punching him in the face. Amy, realizing that Ken told the others her secret, runs off and refuses to let him in to explain when he comes tapping on her bedroom window. In a very nice little moment scored to Jackson Browne's "The Road," Ken starts walking home alone from Amy's house; Daniel pulls up in his Trans Am and sheepishly offers to drive Ken home. Not a word is said about the punch, or about the earlier conversation in Nick's basement; nothing needs to be said.

Amy realizes in a conversation with Lindsay the next day that Ken didn't tell everyone, but she's too caught up in "Hail to the Chief" nerves to concentrate on her Ken problem. Ken, meanwhile, goes to the men's room to figure out what to do and comes across Sam Weir, puking in anticipation of his Cindy break-up. Ken, who knows Sam in passing as Lindsay's kid brother, asks why Sam would want to dump a girl that hot. "She's really different than I am," Sam explains, to which Ken replies wearily, "Yeah, I know how that one goes." Ken says he's on the verge of dumping his girlfriend, too, but can't explain why, so Sam offers up his tale of woe about how Cindy hated "The Jerk," how they have nothing to talk about, and don't have any fun together. Ken explains that Amy's really cool about all that stuff, and Sam bitterly asks him, "God, then what's the problem?" Ken realizes what an idiot he's been and wishes Sam luck.

(Just a perfect scene, as almost every geek/freak world-colliding moment tended to be. Maybe that's why so many people consider "Beers and Weirs" their favorite episode. Among the many reasons I lament the non-existent second season is that at some point the writers would have had no choice but to put Bill and Kim in a room together, if only to see what happened.)

The camera work switches over to hero-style as Ken walks (marches?) through the long line of McKinley marching banders in search of his tuba girl. He finally finds her near the front of the line and declares, sincerely, "I'm sorry, and I don't care, and I'm sorry." Amy smiles, he smiles, and they hug -- only this time, the hug feels like a huge step forward instead of two steps back. (And as a nice real-world touch, ala Lindsay's bag getting stuck on a desk while she tries to storm out of Kowchevski's classroom in "Tests and Breasts," Ken bonks his head on the rim of the tuba while he's moving in.) The Bush assembly begins, and as Amy begins playing "Hail to the Chief," Ken catches her eye and yells out, "Yeah! 'Hail to the Chief!' This song rocks!"

This subplot got the episode nominated for a GLAAD award (they lost to an episode of "Ed," as a matter of fact), and it's not hard to see why. The writers (Apatow, Jon Kasdan and Mike White) get some big laughs out of Ken's confusion, but they also take the situation itself seriously; none of the laughs ever come at Amy's expense. It's a minefield topic, and the writers avoided blowing up.

Considering how much of the episode hangs on Ken and Sam's relationships, it's funny how the climax has little to do with either one, but instead on a third, non-romantic subplot. (The deeper we got into the season, the more the writers seemed interested in moving away from the familiar "This and That" story structure, which may also explain this episode's non-traditional title. Either that, or Apatow, Kasdan and White couldn't come up with a variation on "(Blank) and Bush" that would pass Standards & Practices.)

After treating Mr. Rosso as the very easy butt of jokes for most of the season, the show's penultimate episode (last, really, as "Discos and Dragons" was made several weeks ahead of schedule) finally decides to give our guidance counselor a little respect -- but only after piling one humiliation after another onto the guy.

Rosso proudly tells Lindsay that she's been selected to ask VP Bush the first question in the informal cafeteria Q&A and is bewildered that Lindsay seems so unhappy with this honor. She notes that she's a Democrat, and he responds that they live in a country where you're supposed to question your leaders, but "I guess me and all my hippie friends were just wasting our time at Berkeley." He finally gets her into the spirit of things by explaining that she's special (not in the Eli way) and destined to be around world leaders. At seeing Lindsay's excited face, he utters the "I've got the best job in the world!" line that was cut from the end of the pilot as being too ironic. Before he can bask in the moment, a Secret Service agent -- played by Apatow's old boss, Ben Stiller -- enters and explains that they're commandeering his office as a workspace until the VP's visit is over. As Rosso walks out, Agent Meara (named for Ben's momma) keys his mic and requests a background check on this teacher, who he describes as "about 6'3," a real Dr. Feelgood look."

Lindsay invites Kim to help her brainstorm a really tough question for Bush (Kim jokes that she should ask about Area 51). We don't know what they come up with, but when Lindsay runs into Mr. Rosso in the parking lot -- locked out of his car, because it's just one of those weeks for him -- he bitterly explains that Bush's people rejected whatever the question was as "too... sophisticated" and instead wrote a vapid one of their own: "What is your favorite place to eat in Michigan?" Rosso is really down at the realization that this is a "glorified photo op" and suggests that his Berkeley protesting didn't accomplish much, that "they" stopped the war when they felt like it. Rosso's friends have all sold out for Wall Street jobs that no doubt pay many times his $12 grand salary, "and I can't get the keys out of my mother's car!"

By this point, Lindsay's developed an odd little crush on Rosso ("He's actually kind of good-looking," she tells the disbelieving freaks), but when she complains about the situation to Harold, he asks her not to make waves -- and, in fact, to use the opportunity to put in a plug for his store, which is facing an uncertain future with a chain megastore moving into the mall. "Your only affiliation right now to any party is to the Weir party," he tells her, half-threatening, half-pleading. He even produces an A1 t-shirt for her to wear (which we'll later discover has "Welcome George Bush" stenciled on the back).

The day of the assembly, Lindsay's impressed to see Rosso all cleaned up in a suit, his hair pulled back into a neat braid. He apologizes for his parking lot meltdown and feigns enthusiasm about the VP's visit, but Agent Meara bars him from entering the cafeteria because he's on the mailing list of some questionable organization. As Meara escorts him to a "holding area" (really Rosso's own office), Mr. Rosso shoots Lindsay a beautiful, knowing look that makes it clear exactly what she needs to do.

Agent Meara takes advantage of the situation to get some career counseling from Rosso (being the vice-president's bodyguard feels as pointless a job to him as being a high school guidance counselor no doubt felt to Rosso in the parking lot). He says he just wants to rip off his vest and jacket sometimes and go make pancakes somewhere, "But that'd be crazy, right?" Rosso smiles wisely and offers to give him something like the Kuder preference test to determine his ideal career.

At the assembly, a tearful Cindy Sanders walks off and Lindsay rises nervously in her A1 t-shirt to ask the first question. As her parents gaze proudly at her, she says, "Mr. Vice-President, my name is Lindsay Weir. My dad owns A1 Sporting Goods on 16 Mile Road. My question is... why did your staff reject my question? Are you afraid of an open discourse with the students?" (Really, it's the best possible question she could have asked; if anything's going to make the ineffectual vice-president look bad, it's an attempted cover-up at a high school assembly.) Rosso is listening on the PA as Meara goes through the test ("Do you like working with major appliances?") and, smiling like the proud papa that Harold resembled moments earlier, calls Lindsay "One of McKinley's finest." You know, sometimes that job's not so bad, is it?

Some other thoughts on "The Little Things":

• Two of the deleted scenes for this one are amazing, but one got cut for time and the other got cut because it was mortifying and creepy even by the standards of a show that had Nick stalking Lindsay for the better part of a season. The former is a sequel to Ken's failed visit to Mr. Rosso, in which we discover that while Rosso's not gay, Mr. Kowchevski is. (Kinda puts his whole "Tests and Breasts" speech about Daniel's bedroom eyes in a different light, doesn't it?) The latter features Cindy forcing Sam to recreate their slow dance from the pilot, and to sing "Come Sail Away" (because, of course, Todd never sang for her) and it is absolutely, wonderfully horrible. If you've got the DVDs, please check 'em out. They may be the two best cut scenes in the entire package.
• Speaking of Kowchevski, his one surviving moment in the episode is a funny one, as he (on the Secret Service's orders, because he's a good soldier) chases the freaks from their usual stairwell hangout. Daniel cracks, "How are we ever going to plan our coup?" and Kowchevski seems very pleased by the prospect of getting Daniel arrested for saying that.
• I remembered Stiller's performance as being far more mannered, but he really dials it down. You never don't notice that it's Stiller the movie star, but he has some nice moments like the pancake scene.
• What's with the male freak sleepover? I would write it off as them just hanging out while high, but sleeping bags are involved.
• Getting back to the issue of guns vs. holsters, can we get a gender breakdown of how everybody feels about "The Jerk"? While I've found some women who like it, the list isn't very long, and it feels like one of the more gender-polarizing members of the Geek Comedy Pantheon.
• Need another ruling: is Bill a bad guy for telling Neal about his time with Vicki, or is it cool because he knows Neal will never believe him?

Up next: The end. But what a great and glorious end it is. I hope to be taking some days off later this week for some much-needed family time, so don't expect the "Discos and Dragons" review before, say, Monday. It's going to be a long one, and I want the time to do it right.

What did everybody else think?