Revived and Derived: “Freaks and Geeks” Ep. 10, “The Diary”

In which there's hitchhiking, bad influences and picking softball teams.

Alison: I wonder if it’s due to the fact that Ken’s the only one of the freaks who hasn’t really bonded with Lindsay. Daniel brought her into the group, Kim came around to her after that dinner gone wrong at the Kelly residence, Nick dated her, but as far as we’ve been shown, Ken remains a little cool on our heroine, which makes him a tougher character to work into storylines unless she’s on the outs with everyone again (an arrangement we’ll get to see once more in the next episode). But absolutely agreed on the weirdness of his absences — I’d always remembered this show as having much more Rogen, and yet he only really gets showcased in the last few installments.

This episode offers more of a look at McKinley’s teaching staff, and as you’d expect from this show, the adults are just as gloriously imperfect as the teens who gets the lion’s share of the screen time. There’s Mr. Casper (Ron Marasco), Lindsay, Nick and Kim’s English teacher, whose dorky enthusiasm over Kerouac (“today, we are not in a classroom — we are in a coffee house!”) is tempered by the pettiness of the way he humiliates Kim in front of everyone. There’s Señor O’Hara (Bill Chott), who speaks Spanish like Peggy Hill, and who insists that Lindsay provide her excuse for standing outside talking with her friend after the bell en Español, something Lindsay’s actually able to do. (I was impressed, even if Kim wasn’t.)

And then there’s Coach Fredricks. Tom Wilson’s mere presence in “Freaks and Geeks” is funny in itself, Biff from “Back to the Future” believably grown up and gone to seed as a high school P.E. teacher. But Fredricks is also a major pivot for moments in which there’s intergenerational rapport. This episode emphasizes the way that adult lives and choices can look incomprehensible to kids, though clearly we grow up into people that make them.

Most of us are not the grown-ups we imagined we’d become in our youth — I personally used to assume I would have a rock star death at age 27, a deadline that blew past me with no overdose in a puddle of vomit in sight. So Lindsay’s enthusiasm about “this whole other America out there” that’s actually nothing like what a sheltered suburban girl with dreams of bohemia imagines rings painfully true for me, as does her naïve dismissal of her parents relationship, which is far more loving than she understands — or cares so, because who isn’t squicked out by the idea of their parents indulging in a little afternoon delight?

Fredricks, on the other hand, in this episode and in “Tests and Breasts,” has demonstrated not just that there’s a fundamentally kind heart hidden under that regulation athletic jersey, but that a lot of these perceived cruelties and unjustices from adults come not from malice but from the fact that they’ve simply forgotten what it’s like to be that age. As Bill experiences his “existential crisis of epic scope,” as you so put it, Matt, Fredricks is obliviously bouncing a softball off his arm. The picking of teams might seems like blatant torture to the geeks, but for him, it’s just another day in class. When Bill points out his problem with the set-up, he’s willing to change — it’s not like he came up with it out of calculated coldness.

We still haven’t discussed how Bill got caught. Matt, what are your thoughts on the — I would go so far as to say downright delightful — segment in which Fredricks plays detective with the transcript of Bill’s prank call?

Matt: That scene is tremendous. It speaks to the way “Freaks and Geeks” always remained true to its characters. How else would the immature Alan react to the phrase “sniffing boys’ butts” than hysterical laughter? How else would Neal the performer react to being handed a script than enthusiastically acting it out (in this case, by reading it in his best William Shatner impersonation). And, of course, you have Bill, trying his hardest to disguise his lisp by speaking as nasally as possible. It’s a valiant and totally hopeless effort. That voice is unmistakable.

Alison, as you observed, it’s hard not to see Fredricks as an adult version of Wilson’s Biff from “Back to the Future.” And since Biff loved to called people “buttheads,” the fact that Bill’s threatening phone call involves ample use of the word “butt” strikes me as a brilliant inside joke, akin to the way that the Weir family cereal of choice is Count Chocula as a callback to Joe Flaherty’s Count Floyd character from “SCTV.”

The Fredricks’ scenes are loaded with that sort of attention to detail. I especially like the fact that when Bill calls to insult him, he’s in the midst of a date with one of the female teachers from McKinley; the same female teacher, in fact, that we watched him hit on during Sam’s streaking incident in “Tests and Breasts.” We’ve talked about world-building and continuity in this column before. Touches like that don’t mean anything to the casual viewer, but they’re a huge bonus to loyal fans and a big reason why cultists latched onto the show. And just as “Tests and Breasts” affected “The Diary,” this episode will have repercussions on later shows as well. We’ll see another development in the complicated relationship between Bill and Coach Fredricks in a month when we air “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers.”

Finally, a bit of ironic trivia. This episode was written by Apatow and Rebecca Kirshner. After “Freaks and Geeks,” Kirshner wrote for series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Gilmore Girls” before becoming the executive producer and showrunner of the new version of “90210,” one of the very shows that inspired “Freaks and Geeks”‘ contrarian take on high school. I would have labeled Kirshner (now Sinclair) a chronicler of a less mainstream teen milieu. But if this episode taught us anything, it’s that labels like those are often incorrect.

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