by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

The year 1999 is considered, by many, to be the “Best Movie Year Ever.” However, if you measured television like you consider films, it was an absolute banger of a year for the small screen too. You have The Sopranos (arguably the beginning of modern, prestige television), Family Guy, Futurama, and SpongeBob SquarePants all premiering in what we’d call the 1998-1999 season, but all starting in the glory of the final year before the millennium. 

But even greater were the actual 1999-2000 shows. The shows that started in the year 1999 but were actually in the TV season of note were The West Wing, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Home Movies, Angel (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off), Popular (our first exposure to Ryan Murphy), Roswell, and Freaks and Geeks. And hey! Would you look at that, three of them are squarely teen shows. What do you think the odds are of that?

Popular is a show that seems to have fallen through the cracks. It’s well on its way to becoming a kind of lost media, like the teen shows I talked about alongside Dawson’s Creek. However, it marks the first series from future powerhouse Ryan Murphy. It ran on The WB, our well-established Big Teen Network and lasted for two seasons (a collective 43 episodes). It also marked the beginning of at least one long-term actor relationship for Murphy, a calling card of modern Murphy shows, with Leslie Grossman, who’s still appearing in his shows to this day. 

The story of Popular is pretty classic: a loser and a popular girl become stepsisters when their parents get married. They’re then forced to deal with the social implications of the new relationship. Between Popular and Glee, which we’ll talk about in December, Murphy made the much more adult show of Nip/Tuck, which started his relationship with FOX/FX and was a lot of people’s entry point into the kinds of shows he would go on to make. However, his entries into the teen genre are nothing to scoff at. Perhaps Popular isn’t particularly well known, but Glee was massive in ways we can only dream of understanding fully. 

Then there’s Roswell, a show that ran for three seasons—even doing the Buffy bounce, airing on both The WB and UPN before it was canceled. Based off a series of Pocket Books (which I associate with school book fair material), the show was about a group of teen aliens who were just trying to hide in plain sight when Liz, the lead of the show and definitely not an alien, gets shot in a freak accident at her work. Max, her eventual love interest, saves her with his alien powers and she gets entangled in the mystery of why they’re on Earth, how they got here, and what forces want to upset that dynamic. 

Originally developed as Roswell High (the title of the first book) by 20th Century Fox Television and Regency Television for FOX, it eventually landed at The WB with a new title (drop the “High,” it’s cleaner). As a side note, did you know that Regency had a television division for the better part of a decade? They produced Malcolm in the Middle during that time, which is cool! They’ve apparently relaunched in the UK, which is cool but also seems kind of random. Anyway, The WB wrangled the show away from FOX, despite them producing it, because they promised a full 22-episode first season upfront. Which… that’s pretty damn good considering how firmly we were still in the classic TV model at the time. They shot the pilot in 12 days (kind of long, honestly) and it cost $2 million, which means it would have cost roughly $3.7 million if they shot it today. After its premiere, the first season sat comfortably in the 3-4 million viewer range, which means that while it wasn’t doing Dawson’s Creek numbers, it was still doing similar numbers to Buffy’s first season. Which, I think is important to note, since it’s a genre show and those were good enough numbers to renew the series. 

Also, there’s a nice comparison point here because of all the shows I’ve already talked about, or will talk about soon, Roswell is one of the only ones that has had a modern reboot—kind of! The CW’s 2019 show, Roswell, New Mexico, is technically a second adaptation of the book series, not a remake of the original show from the 1999-2000 TV season. However, it’s interesting to use it as an example of where we are in TV land today. Roswell, New Mexico did run for one additional season (bringing its total up to four) but, collectively, it had less episodes—nine less episodes, to be exact. And its viewership in the first season was somewhere near 1 million average viewers and only went down from there. The show never broke over 2 million viewers, something the original Roswell was doing every single episode. However, like many other shows on The CW, this was par for the course. Roswell, New Mexico’s numbers were well within what is acceptable for the network in our modern era.

Additionally, the three biggest actors to come out of Roswell are, inarguably, Katherine Heigl, Shiri Appleby, and Emilie de Ravin. William Sadler was also in the cast, but he was already a known factor. However, if you wanna talk about a show where almost every single cast member became specifically famous, then your answer for the 1999-2000 TV season is Freaks and Geeks. 

Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow for NBC, Freaks and Geeks only ran for a single season before it was unceremoniously canceled due to its low viewership. Which… I mean, how are you meant to sustain a devoted following for a show when no one ever actually knows when it’s gonna be on? That was, perhaps, one of Freaks and Geeks biggest problems. Do you wanna hear something absolutely deranged about it, though? Despite not airing all 18 episodes in the first season and mucking them about in terms of order, the lowest viewership the show ever had was 4 million. The pilot had the most, which is not all that surprising, with a little over 9 million viewers, but the show was very much watched.

Oh, and what about those stars? Freaks and Geeks is a show about Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) and her brother Sam (John Francis Daley). Their grandmother just died, and while it’s not really affecting Sam and his friend group of titular geeks (which includes Samm Levine and Martin Starr), it’s really messing with Lindsay and her idea of herself and her friendships. She throws herself into the other titular group, the freaks. This group includes James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Busy Philipps. So, the stars of late 2000s through mid-2010s comedy in film and television are well represented!

Despite its popularity and status as a cult classic, Freaks and Geeks does still suffer from the potentially forgotten media, as discussed in my piece about Dawson’s Creek. There have actually been a few versions of the DVD/Blu-Ray box set made over the last few decades. As of 2021, however, both the DVD and Blu-Ray sets have been discontinued and are considered “out-of-print.” I think Freaks and Geeks is less likely to be forgotten, but there’s always a chance, should it ever go off streaming. 

Freaks and Geeks also holds a special place in the hearts of many industry people. Anecdotally, it’s one of the few shows that many execs would accept spec scripts for long after the 1999-2000 season. Like, when I was in college and studying screenwriting, we had the option to write one, and it was likely we’d still be able to use it as a sample. Maybe not the first sample, but if you could nail a Freaks and Geeks episode then you were golden. And that’s the legacy of the show and, ultimately, the legacy of the 1999-2000 season of teen shows. 

Popular ushered in Ryan Murphy as a powerhouse showrunner. He would go on to change the face of teen dramedy, for the better or the worse. Roswell brought us Katherine Heigl who, love it or hate it, became the face for romantic comedies in the mid-2000s. And Freaks and Geeks brought us all the movers and shakers of the stoner comedies of the next era. All the shows were pretty well loved in their own time, representing teenagerdom as best they could within their own limitations, but they became legacies. Very much living in the idea of “what we do in our teenage years often sets us up for the future” but if it was about people’s careers and the future was the entertainment that reigned supreme.