Esquire.com is pitting canceled-too-soon TV shows against one another in a head-to-head, winner-takes-all bracket. It's the TV Reboot Tournament. Vote now and see which comes out on top. We're also revisiting some of our favorite unjustly defunct gems through interviews with showrunners and performers, including one-seed Freaks and Geeks. Read what creator Paul Feig has to say about the joys and pains of the one-season show he put so much heart and sweat into below.

Exactly 15 years ago this month, NBC pulled the plug on Freaks and Geeks, a then low-rated square peg of a show that was praised by critics, beloved by a devoted cluster of fans, and is now universally considered one of the most honest, hilarious teen TV series of all time. Since then, Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig—who based much of the dramedy's relatable awkwardness on his own experiences growing up in Michigan—has done a number of notable things. He has directed episodes of other excellent TV shows, including Mad Men, The Office, Arrested Development, and Parks and Recreation. He has directed the box-office smashes Bridesmaids and The Heat, and will bring another Melissa McCarthy vehicle, Spy, to theaters this June. Oh, yeah: He's also signed on to tackle the much-hyped female reboot of Ghostbusters, which he'll begin shooting this summer

It's safe to say that Feig, 52, is hardly stuck in high school. But start talking to him about the experience of making Freaks and Geeks and a lot of his thoughts and feelings about that particular high school experience come flowing out. He talks about why none of the kids on the show wore Nikes; the way teen sexuality was addressed; and he reflects on the combination of relief and profound loss that accompanied the show's cancelation, news that reached him right as he was reeling from his mother's sudden death. And he notes that if it were handled smartly, Freaks and Geeks could potentially be rebooted... as a Broadway musical.

As busy as you are, I'm sure you don't have a lot of time to sit around watching old episodes of Freaks and Geeks. I'm curious, though: When was the last time you watched part of an episode?

Man. It's been a long time. I have a hard time watching old stuff, especially that one, because I just get really sad when I watch it. You know, it was such a great experience and there was so much more we wanted to do with it, so it's a little tough. I'm trying to think: the actual last time—God, I don't know. I think it was at one of our events when we screened it. Now that it's on Netflix, whenever I look through my queue, I always go, "I should watch one again." But then I don't.

"It was such a great experience and there was so much more we wanted to do with it, so it's tough."

Is it a little bit like looking at old photographs?

Yeah, I get very nostalgic about it, and you know—I'm happy with all of it. [But] things age, definitely, and as you kind of go forward with what you do, you see certain things. It's not even that you would change anything, it's like the different ways you hear production and dialogue. I don't know, it's weird. As a director you can't help but be hard on everything you used to do. But I like it. It's really held up. When I have seen it, performance-wise and cast-wise, it doesn't feel antiquated to me. The biggest regret is that it's not letterboxed, so you always have to watch in that 4x3 format that TV used to be in, you know. I wish it could be widescreen. But no—I'll never not be proud of that show.

One of the reasons the show doesn't age is that it was already set in a previous era. I love the way you handled that because so many TV shows and movies set in the '70s or '80s sort of lob their '70s-ness and '80s-ness in your face, in a way that doesn't feel authentic. You guys did a wonderfully subtle job of making it feel authentically like 1980. Were you and Judd Apatow and the other writers always trying to be vigilant about that?

That was the most important thing to me. That's why, floating around on the Internet, is the bible I wrote for the show, like right after I wrote the pilot. We were all about making sure that we were super-accurate. I was really hung up on that. I brought all my old yearbooks in for the production designers and costumers and all that, just to make sure—yeah, to make sure that we weren't That '70s Show. Because it's always, like you say: "Oh, the '70s. So it was leisure suits and disco shoes!" It's like, no, that really wasn't the case.

The show is very accurate to what my experience was growing up in the late '70s in Michigan. So I was very vigilant about making sure we never did anything like that. Even down to the point where, Nike always wanted to give us shoes that the kids would wear. It's like: Nikes were just starting to come in when I was in high school, because my dad owned an Army surplus store that also sold tennis shoes and that kind of thing. I remember the very first Nikes came into his store in, like, '79 and nobody knew what they were, and so people weren't even really buying them. Just the idea that [the kids] would walk around in Nikes didn't feel right. I'm trying to think if we put a pair in or not. We may have, but it was just kind of like, we'll do this once. My memory was we didn't put any in. But it was just that level of detail.

I mean, that whole disco Parisian nightsuit episode is based on when I was growing up. I was in a disco phase and there was a disco store in the mall, which was exactly what we portrayed in the show. It actually looked exactly like that. It was called Silverman's. Wearing that sort of extreme style into the school was basically as it is in the show, where the minute I walked in, I realized, Oh my God, I made a huge mistake. I look so different than everybody else. This is just a major swing that should not have been taken. And then I just had to try to get out of school.

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I just wanted to portray that in any part of life, not that many people take swings and not that many things are extreme. Everybody really holds to sort of a blending-in standard. That's what I always liked about the idea of the freaks and the geeks, because they were the ones who would challenge in some ways. With the freaks, by just not paying attention to the rules, and the geeks—we were just not in tune with what you were supposed to wear to try to be fashionable. So I just really wanted to talk about that line and make it feel real.

When we first sold the show... my first worry was that they were going to make it contemporary, and I just didn't want to do that, for all those reasons. I thought it would have a more timeless appeal if it was already something that was taking place in the past. For me the biggest thing was I just didn't want a lot of technology around. The idea of cell phones and the Internet and all that just would have hurt it. What I liked about when I grew up is that it was the age where you had to talk to someone, even if it was on the phone. You had to communicate more directly with people.

Also, just the idea that it was pre-AIDS was a real important thing to me because, you know, in the '80s being afraid of sex was sort of a survival instinct, versus in the '70s, when sex was rampant. So if you were hung-up or scared of it, it was directly on you. I think that was probably the biggest motivation for me wanting it to be back then. There were so many shows over the years about high school or about teenagers, and everyone was so casual and so cool about the idea of sex and that level of intimacy and exposing one's soul, both physically and mentally. That wasn't my experience growing up, and it wasn't really the experience of my friends. We all had, at various levels, sort of discomfort with girls and the idea of dating. You knew that there was sexual activity going on at the school, or with the advanced kids at the school, but not everybody was at that maturity level.

I'm not a prude by any means, but just: Kids are forced to mature at the same rate these days and I like that it took us a long time to get to that point. My biggest terror in tenth grade was that I was going to ask a girl to the dance and I'd have to kiss her at the end of the night. I just think that's a fun thing to portray. Or the thing we had, in one of the episodes that I love, where they actually get a porno from Daniel, from Franco's character, and then watch it. Just: What is the horror of the first time you see something like that? You don't see that [on TV]—I hadn't seen it up to that point.

You mentioned earlier that you had ideas for the show if it had continued. I read a Vanity Fair piece where you went into specifics about what you had in mind for certain characters. You were the most specific about Sam—you wanted to have him get involved in the drama club, which mirrored your own experience. You also thought about things like Kim getting pregnant.

The biggest concern going in was, you know, if we do a show that, we got lucky and it ran for eight years, you don't know want it to be in year seven: Now they're juniors. That kind of thing. Suddenly, they're the oldest high school kids you've ever seen in your life. I really wanted to make sure that every year was a school year and that it was much more a show about this small town and this group of people in the town.

So then going from that, I wanted it to mirror my experience so that every year you come back to school and everybody would be in a different place. That's why I was so happy with the final episode. You know, people occasionally say, Oh, we wish that you had really gotten to wrap up the series. I did wrap up the series as far as I was concerned. It was the end of the school year, everybody was going into a different place, mixing with different people. Daniel was mixing with the geeks. You could just tell that everybody was going off to whatever they would be the next year. That would have changed at the end of every season. So I just wanted to make sure that the new season had those—where you come back into school after the summer off, thinking everybody's the same as you are, and then suddenly, oh my God, somebody's pregnant. Oh my God, now Bill's joined the basketball team. And now Neil is way into swing choir and he's got a new group of friends. It was always that trading-up of friends. You kind of kept a core group, but even then somebody in the core group would defect.

I had a couple of friends, one in particular, who were super-nerdy. We used to do sleepovers—we were just the geekiest guys you ever wanted to meet. Then one year I came back and one of them, it was only after, I think, freshman year, was a total burnout. Like a total, dark burnout who wouldn't talk to me anymore. He got super long-haired and really became the sort of dark character that walked around the halls and had his freak friends, but completely disowned me and any of our other nerdy friends. I like that level of going: Yeah, this is where everybody's figuring out who they are and their personalities. So that's why I wanted to make sure our second season reflected that. Like you say, also, for Sam, the lead character: I had a lot of stories I wanted to tell about being in drama club, just because I had such an interesting experience with that. With my drama teacher, who was the biggest influence in my life professionally, and yet was really a troubled soul—who was an alcoholic and I became kind of her enabler and right-hand person... I always wanted to figure out how to work it into the first season. But then I thought, oh no, it will be something we can really spend time with second season and then, again, that goes back to the sadness of watching it again. Because you're like, Oh shit. We never got to do that.

"I don't want to do anything to revisit Freaks and Geeks that isn't awesome."

At one point I think you had talked about adapting Freaks and Geeks as a play. Can you imagine doing that or rebooting it in some way?

Yeah, I want to do it as a musical. I think it would make a great musical, if we figured out how to do it great and not just as some blatant grab for money. It feels like the kind of thing that could be a fun, interesting, musical stage show because the emotions are so conducive to having musical numbers that are either very sad or very thought-provoking or very funny and goofy and weird. Music was such a big part of the series that it just feels very much like it could fall into that pocket. But this is something I've talked about wanting to do for years and years, and in order to do it right, you've really got to spend some time and figure it out.

I don't want to do anything to revisit Freaks and Geeks that isn't awesome, and so in general, I personally have stayed away from it. I still haven't had that idea where you're like, Oh my God, that's it. This is gold. This is the way to do it. People are going to love this. I'm so proud of what it was, the last thing I ever want to do, or want any of us to do, is ruin the memory of it. It's like every time I would watch—especially in the '90s, they did a lot of those kind of reunion shows. You know, you became more sad [watching them] than anything. That was different because our cast is still young and vital. Now if you do it, they're all movie stars and stuff, so it probably adds a different thing. But those other shows, you'd watch and go, Oh, they look so old. You know? I didn't want to visit them now, because I liked them back then. That's probably partly why I wanted to do a reboot of Ghostbusters as opposed to doing it as a sequel. It's saying, look, let's just let that thing exist. It's awesome. So let's not suddenly try to revisit it.

In the current TV landscape, do you think Freaks and Geeks would have a better chance of surviving? I feel like there are so many more outlets now that a show like that would have a better chance than it did back then.

Yeah, I originally wrote it to be an HBO show, just because I wanted it to be a little harder-edged. I wanted it to be able to have swearing and smoking and pot-smoking and all, because that just felt very real. But then when NBC wanted to buy it, we were thrilled. Especially then, when networks were really king and queen of the world. That was a big deal.

I wouldn't even think about taking it to a network now. Look, if Netflix had existed back then and we were somehow on Netflix, we would have done way better because we're the kind of show, like most shows are, where you've got to watch a bunch of shows in a row. And then you get hooked. That's why I think we've done so much better once we came out on DVD. Because people binge-watch it and then they really get caught up in it. Pretty much all the shows that are popular these days became that way because people got to catch up with them binge-watching. When I worked on the first season of Mad Men, that was an awesome show, but the ratings—check your sources, but the ratings were not that great that first season. It wasn't until that second season, when they'd put out the DVDs and people had been reading all these great reviews and they binge-watched the first season, and then you're hooked.

I have a new show coming out on Yahoo in April called Other Space, and they originally wanted to do it one episode per week, and I said, "No, we've got to do this where we put them all out at once." Because I just think that's the only way for most things to catch an audience these days. You need to immerse yourself in characters and situations. So I would go toward any of these outlets that allow you to put things out all at once.

Now that you look back with almost 15 years of hindsight, do you still wish Freaks and Geeks had continued? Or do you look at your career since then and think, everything happens for a reason?

Even though I'm sad that it's gone, I'm pretty zen about it. I've always been a kind of person who, for no mystical reason other than I feel life works this way: What's meant to happen happened. I think there are a million different variables. I don't think there's some sort of destiny guiding you anywhere. I just think, more than anything, you take lemons and make lemonade out of it.

Making those 18 episodes was so enormously difficult, just because we were working so hard to make sure everything was great and really treating every single episode like it was a little independent film, that I was exhausted. And then my mom died, like two days before we got canceled. I can't lie. I remember the first thing I thought was—Judd called me and said we'd been canceled, and I was like, Oh, thank God. Because I was just exhausted. I was exhausted from the season, I was exhausted from losing my mom, which was a total surprise. It was only like a week later or a few days later, when suddenly I started getting really sad. Then I was like, Oh, shit. There's all this stuff that we wanted to do. Then it was almost like a multiple death in the family. The worst part was that realization of going, like, Oh my God, all these characters are essentially dead now. Because we can't—they're gone. We had all these stories we wanted to tell through them, and things I wanted to bring out. And then you go, oh my God, there's no outlet for that anymore and these characters that we were just starting to learn and just starting to have fun with and really want to take on a journey: They're just gone.

We had such a high-end team, if you look at who was writing on our show and all of us running the show and our amazing cast, that I don't think we would have jumped the shark. At least not for a few seasons. But I also go, these 18 are kind of great and we'll never have to worry about that. It's sort of set in amber now, and I like that.

If now, looking back, I could go, Oh my God, there were 100 fucking episodes that just were great the whole time—yeah, I'd love to have that. But the amount of time that has to go into that—like you say, I got to work on a lot of awesome stuff and now I've had this kind of gift at getting a second shot at having a movie career. You know, my movie career died once, hardcore, in 2007. But I got to come back. I thank Judd all the time for giving me the opportunity to direct Bridesmaids, which came out of our relationship that existed even before Freaks and Geeks. I'm very happy.

When I was in film school, we would watch classic movies. And I remember the first time I discovered It's a Wonderful Life and going, Oh God, if you could just make one thing that means that much to people, that would be awesome. Everything else would be gravy. Not that Freaks and Geeks is It's a Wonderful Life by any means, but just the level of loyalty—that it just keeps going and people love it so much, and people haven't forgotten about it. That allowed me to go like, Oh, cool. I kind of got that thing I wanted.

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