The Little Things (Freaks and Geeks)

Only in a show as great as Freaks and Geeks could an episode like “The Little Things” end up being the weakest the show ever produced. It certainly isn’t bad, but it might be the only episode to feature a plot that could be described as “frivolous.” It features one crucial development—Sam ends up breaking up with Cindy—but the rest doesn’t fit together quite like the best Freaks and Geeks episodes do. The show is famous for telling multiple stories per episode, and giving them each plenty of screen time so that they seem important. Of the three plots contained within “The Little Things,” one is important, another is nice but ultimately lacks impact, and one just seems to come out of another, weaker show. There are Freaks and Geeks episodes I like more than others, but “The Little Things” is one of the few I can’t wholly get behind.

Let’s begin with the good: Sam is forced to call off his newfound relationship with Cindy. From the beginning, this situation is everything Sam had wanted. Yet it doesn’t take long for him to find out that just because she’s real purdy doesn’t mean she’s his soul mate. Quite the opposite, in fact. Despite their newfound relationship, Sam is still a geek at heart while Cindy is your stereotypical “popular girl.” As horrible as high school cliques frequently are, they exist for a reason. When you attempt to change identities, it may not always end up working out very well. For one thing, the landscape of the cafeteria has been dramatically altered. Sam, normally one to sit with his friends and talk about Airplane!, is now forced to bear witness to the inane ramblings of jocks and cheerleaders. Never has he felt less at home.

Even worse, it seems Cindy does not share his enthusiasm for the comedic film work of Steve Martin. Ultimately, this may be something of a deal breaker for Sam. When the duo goes together to a screening of The Jerk, Sam is laughing his rear end off while Cindy is visibly bored. When she tries to give Sam a hickey, he is less than responsive. All he wants is to watch Steve Martin behave like a moron. Is this so much to ask? When he even tries to give her a gift (an admittedly ugly necklace) she refuses to wear it. This entire build-up of unpleasantness will prove to be too much for young Mr. Weir to handle, so he ultimately chooses to break it off.

When he tells Cindy he no longer wishes to remain an item, she is shocked. It is clear that after her relationship with Todd, she was looking for a nice young boy who would never, ever break up with her. If anything, she would be the one to decide when it’s over. She may have genuinely liked Sam, but she never—to use the high school terminology—liked liked him. She just wanted a guy who wasn’t a jerk. As a result, she used him and took advantage of his genuine kindness. Ultimately, “The Little Things” provides one of the few times in the series that Sam ever really stood up for himself. He has spent the whole series getting pushed around, but he will no longer have any of it. Yes, he had a crush on Cindy, but he would have been happier had a real relationship remained a figment of his own imagination.

Meanwhile, Seth Rogen’s Ken has spent much of the Freaks and Geeks run as a background character. Rare is the time when an entire plot revolved around him. Yet “The Little Things” (along with the past episode “The Garage Door”) proved that Rogen was capable of being a leading man (of sorts). His relationship with the tuba player Amy has been moving along swimmingly—so much so that she is ready to make a potentially embarrassing confession: she was initially born with both male and female genitalia, and her parents eventually made the decision that she be female. Ken initially seems fine with this news, but he eventually starts to over-think things and question the relationship itself. He knows he still likes Amy, but what does that make him? Is he gay for liking a girl who, at one point, had “both the gun and the holster?” The obvious answer is “no,” but in his hormonal mind he is willing to consider all the possibilities.

While this plot is admittedly bold, it lacks one quality which most Freaks and Geeks have: it doesn’t really move the character of Ken forward to its full extent. Yes, he learns a valuable lesson from this, but he ultimately ends the episode in the exact same place where he began: in love with Amy. Perhaps these limitations are inherent in the character of Ken, but the hermaphrodite development ultimately proves to be little more than a bump in the road. While it’s nice for a character’s story to have a wholly positive resolution, it seems to clash with Freaks and Geeks’ usual brand of squirm-inducing drama. (Like the aforementioned Sam/Cindy plot.)

Yet the Ken stuff in this episode proved to be most important off-camera, as it likely secured Rogen’s long-term spot in the Apatow pantheon going forward. He would get a role in the good-not-great (but equally brief) sitcom Undeclared before moving on to other Apatow projects like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, among other things. It’s undeniable that Rogen shows some real dramatic chops in this episode, and so his ultimate stardom would prove to be very well-deserved. I can only imagine that a second season of Freaks and Geeks would have explored Ken further, but this is what we have.

Yet the plot that ultimately hampers “The Little Things” would prove to be my least favorite in the entire series: Vice President George H.W. Bush is paying a visit to the high school, and Lindsay Weir gets to ask him a question. Yes, there’s the whole “freedom of speech” stuff, but that all seems to clash with the more introverted tone the show had accomplished. Freaks and Geeks is a show about a single suburban high school and the troubled teens within it, and bringing in outsiders only proved to be a distraction rather than a vital development. It’s all made worse by a cameo from Ben Stiller, which seems like a ratings stunt more than anything. Yes, Stiller is a funny man—his cameo in Undeclared would fare much better—but his straight-faced goofiness doesn’t work at all in the world of Freaks and Geeks. Maybe the Bush plot was used to bring some levity to an episode primarily about ugly break-ups and hermaphroditism, but it just does not work.

Yet there is one scene in “The Little Things” that shows Freaks and Geeks at its best, and that is when Sam and Ken meet up in the restroom and discuss their respective girl troubles. While Sam has nothing in common with Cindy, Ken remembers that he actually really, really likes Amy. So, in the words of Sam, “what’s the problem?” Some of my favorite scenes of the show came when two dissimilar characters were placed in the same room and they were forced to discuss the problems in their life. Often it led to one party making a minor revelation, and sometimes the insights were mutual. There’s more emotion in that one scene than there is in the entire Bush plot combined. Luckily, the finale “Discos and Dragons” would end the show on exactly the right note. That will be the subject of my next—and final—Freaks and Geeks post.