Paul Feig's tragically shortlived ensemble comedy-drama, Freaks and Geeks, kicked off in September of 1999 with a bit of deception. The series opens on the bleachers alongside football practice at a Michigan high school in 1980. A pretty blonde cheerleader and her handsome quarterback boyfriend gaze longingly into each other's eyes and profess their eternal love, leading viewers to believe they're about to buckle in for a standard teen sap-fest. But then, as Van Halen's 1978 metal classic "Runnin' with the Devil" plays in the background, the camera pans ten feet down to reveal the scene beneath the couple, where a group of stoners is complaining about having a Molly Hatchet shirt banned from church.

In just three minutes, Freaks and Geeks sets up its perspective: This isn't a typical high school drama about the jocks and popular kids. It's a show about the burnouts and nerds, as if that wasn't clear enough from the title. And supporting these outcast characters would be the pop culture they consumed—clothing, movies, and, in particular, music. But unlike other shows set during this era that beat viewers over the head with time-appropriate cultural references (the opening scene in That '70s Show's pilot, which had aired a year prior, relied heavily on a joke about a perm where the punchline was basically: perms were a funny hairstyle), Freaks and Geeks wove its cultural retrospection lovingly throughout its solidly constructed storylines.

A few yards away, a group of freshmen is seen getting bullied for quoting Bill Murray's lines from Caddyshack. After breaking up the fight to protect her perpetually picked-on younger brother, the show's main character, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini), looks off into the distance and grumbles: "Man, I hate high school." Cut to the jarring opening chords of show's theme song, Joan Jett's loud, snotty "Bad Reputation." Most TV shows spend their entire pilot episode establishing their identity, but Freaks and Geeks got it done before the opening credits.

By 1980, disco was on its last dance, Hustling itself into a bellbottomed grave. The 1977 film Saturday Night Fever had brought disco culture to the mainstream and ultimately put an expiration date on the dance fad, first in New York City where it originated and then spreading to the Midwest and Middle America. Freaks and Geeks acknowledges its post-disco existence in the first episode. Lindsay asks her newfound freak friends if they're going to the school dance and is met with a collective eyeroll.

Disco has its own sad story arc across the show's 18-episode run. Later on, in the final episode, "Discos and Dragons," Andopolis, an aspiring rock drummer, is mortified when his friends discover his dirty secret: that he has been spending his nights preparing for a dance competition set in a pathetically sparse discotheque in the back of a bowling alley with his girlfriend (Lizzy Caplan). It's a humiliating experience, being caught in a lame scene past its prime (and in platform shoes no less), but, being a high school boy, his love of girls supersedes his hatred of disco.

On the other end of the musical spectrum, punk exploded at the end of the 70s as a reaction to the disco craze. In the episode "Noshing and Moshing," the hopelessly delinquent Daniel Desario, also motivated by a crush on a girl, has a brief experimentation with the budding genre. He brings home a few LPs from the record store, including Black Flag's iconic punk album, Damaged (which actually wouldn't be released until the end of 1981 but we'll grant a pass here), puts it on the turntable in his bedroom, and nods along to the riffs, having a political awakening while hearing Henry Rollins' voice blaring through his headphones: "Rise above, we're gonna rise above!" For a minute, it seems like the aimless Desario has found his perfect musical match in the rebellious, nihilistic genre. Ultimately, though, after spiking his hair with egg yolks and getting roughed up at a punk show (featuring a performance by the band Diesel Boy), he decides he's more comfortable as a run-of-the-mill burnout than a "punker."

But while punk and disco each got episodes devoted to them, Freaks and Geeks didn't always rely on shifting music trends to carry entire plots. The show was also rife with shorter, strategically used musical moments. Sometimes they were deliberately awkward, like when guidance counselor Mr. Rosso (Dave Allen) busts out an acoustic guitar to connect with his students over their shared love of Alice Cooper, or when Andopolis busts one out to serenade Lindsay Weir with his Pete Townshend-inspired cheesy love song, "Lady L." One excruciatingly cringeworthy moment sees the goodie-goodie Christian girl Millie (Sarah Hagan) playing the Doobie Brothers' "Jesus Is Just Alright" on a piano at a party to prove to her peers that sobriety can be fun.