Freaks & Geeks

'Freaks & Geeks' coming to Hulu with full original soundtrack

Freaks & Geeks, Judd Apatow and Paul Feig‘s series about small town high school life in 1980 that ran on NBC in 1999-2000, only lasted a season, and not many people tuned it when it was on. A nuanced, funny, but accurate show about the many mortifications of adolescence, Freaks & Geeks was probably too realistic about high school life for network television, but it was a fantastic show that has grown and grown in status over the 21 years since it aired. It’s now considered a one-season wonder cult classic, and nearly every person attached to the show has gone on to bigger and better things.

The series’ soundtrack, full of late-’70s rock, as well as a little punk and new wave, was intrinsic to the show, be it the choice of Styx‘s “Come Sail Away” in the series premiere’s school dance scene, to Jason Segel‘s character’s obsession with Rush, and Linda Cardellini’s character’s discovery of The Grateful Dead. (There was also a whole episode that just used songs by The Who.) Freaks & Geeks spent so much of their budget on music that it took them four years to find a company who would pay for the rights to release the show on DVD with the soundtrack intact. When the series streamed via Netflix, most of the soundtrack was there, but not all of it. The show left Netflix in 2018, and last year, when asked why the series wasn’t available anywhere, Judd Apatow wrote on Twitter, “the music needs to be cleared for Freaks and Geeks and [Judd’s other show] Undeclared. If it isn’t, your DVD will be all there is.”

Good news: Freaks & Geeks is coming to Hulu on January 25 and AV Club has confirmed that it will stream with its original soundtrack intact. It would be a shame if this scene were soundtracked to some generic temp music:

Today someone asked Apatow via Twitter if there was a song they’d wanted to use for Freaks & Geeks but couldn’t afford. He replied, “We cleared “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” for the end of the punk rock episode but we got canceled and switched to a less expensive Dean Martin song because we didn’t know if it would ever be seen. A bad mistake.”

Stream a playlist of the soundtrack below: