JUDD APATOW: An underling calls and tells you the show is canceled and then they say, “Garth is going to call in a little bit.” They give you an hour to digest, so by the time he calls you don’t really have the energy to argue. I always wondered if Garth had me on speakerphone, with his underlings laughing as I cried and begged.

LESLIE MANN (actress, “Mrs. Foote”; also married to Judd Apatow): Dealing with all the ratings bullshit was hard, but then when it was finally canceled it was like Judd lost a family member. It was just horrible, horrible.

PAUL FEIG: I remember everyone at the network coming to my mom’s funeral. And Judd getting some secret joy of “Good, I’m glad they’re all here.” It made me laugh: he’s enjoying the fact that they had to come and see me in a diminished state.

LINDA CARDELLINI: I was asked to go on David Letterman—a lifelong dream. So I fly to New York and I’m in the limousine on my way to the show and I got a call from my publicist, and she said, “I’m so sorry, honey, the show’s been canceled.” And I said, “David Letterman has been canceled?” And she said, “No, Freaks and Geeks.” It didn’t really hit me until I was sitting with Dave and he said he was sorry the show was over. And I thought, Oh my God, David Letterman is telling me my show is canceled, and at the same time this is one of the most exciting things to ever happen to me.

JUDD APATOW: I felt like a father to everybody, and I felt like everyone’s world was about to collapse. I felt responsible, like I had to fight to have it survive so that their lives would be O.K., so that their careers could get launched. And so to completely fail was devastating to me. And especially for Paul, because this was Paul’s story.

PAUL FEIG: We were still in postproduction on the last three episodes. The network was like, “Finish them up,” but we didn’t have anywhere to show them.

JUDD APATOW: We stayed in editing for months, obsessing over every detail, in both rage and depression, for a show that had been canceled. I was so upset I herniated a disc and had to have surgery.

PAUL FEIG: And that’s when we did that day at the Museum of Television and Radio in L.A., where we showed the four episodes that hadn’t aired. That was the coolest thing ever, in a theater packed with fans, with every episode just rocking the house.

SAMM LEVINE: Scott Sassa called me himself and said, “I loved the show. But at the end of the day, it’s a business.” I’ve been on a lot of canceled shows since then and I’ve never heard from the network president.

Sassa had decided to cancel the show when he saw a rough cut for Paul’s final episode, in which Lindsay, apparently headed for a summer-school program, instead runs off with Kim to follow the Grateful Dead.

SCOTT SASSA: They show Lindsay traveling in the bus—I almost popped the tape out, because I thought I knew where they were going—and all of a sudden the bus goes by and the freaks are there in that van going to the Grateful Dead concert. And I thought, “That’s not how this thing should end.”

JUDD APATOW: I only found out later that when Scott Sassa saw the cut of the finale and he saw them get in the van he realized we would never do the things that would make the show commercial. That doesn’t take away from the fact that Scott was the biggest supporter of the show; it’s only good because he gave us all this creative leeway. But that’s the funny thing about this work: you can do something you really like and someone else just looks at it and says, “I need to end this today.”