Copyright Parade
Judd Apatow is the mind behind not some, but many of the most beloved titles in entertainment. Over the past 25 years, the Long Island native has not only blessed us with comedy classics like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Bridesmaids, but also executive produced generation-defining shows like Girls and Freaks and Geeks. More often than not, the stories that happen behind the scenes in Hollywood are just as captivating as what we see onscreen—and that’s exactly what Apatow brings in his new visual memoir, Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures. The pages are filled with hilarious and heartfelt reflections on his favorite projects and collaborators, perfectly paired with hundreds of never-before-seen photos spanning decades. Complete with a foreword by Lena Dunham, Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures is in bookstores now. Parade has obtained an exclusive excerpt, where Apatow reveals why Freaks and Geeks gave him the courage to take risks in his career. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade’s Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 Freaks and Geeks Paul Feig and I were already good friends when he acted in Heavyweights. A few years later I had a deal with DreamWorks to make television, so I told him to let me know if he ever had anything he wanted to try to get made. Then one day he handed me an envelope and inside was the pilot of Freaks and Geeks. I was blown away. Nobody ever just hands you a script that wonderful. We were able to sell it to NBC very quickly and we hired Jake Kasdan to be the director. Then we worked very hard to get the script as strong as it could be, but when we did the auditions, we were open to rewriting it based on who we found. We didn’t just want people who fit the characters, we wanted the kind of people that weren’t usually on TV. Paul didn’t want this to look like Dawson’s Creek. Some of the cast didn’t even really need to be actors. We could teach them to act—all that mattered was authenticity. They gave us a bad time slot. We kept getting preempted for things like sports, so we were only on half the time at first. The episodes were being aired out of order. We knew we wouldn’t last too long, so Paul and I decided to shoot the last episode of the season a few episodes early, just in case we suddenly got canceled, so at least we would have an ending to the story. That’s how paranoid we were. The network took me to lunch one day and said, “We want these characters to have more victories.” I told him that the entire point of the show is how kids handle failure, how they lean on their friends, and how they survive disappointment. That lunch didn’t go very well. When we were canceled, there were still three episodes that hadn’t aired yet. Then at some point, over the summer, they just burned them off on a Saturday night. Back then you didn’t know if a one-season series would get released on DVD. DVDs were for big hit shows, not for premature cancelations, but we really worked hard to convince Shout Factory to put it out. Now, 25 years later, it seems clear that one of the reasons why the show came out so well was because the entire time we knew we would get canceled, so we didn’t save any of our good ideas for another season. We tried to be as bold and deep as we could, because trying to water it down for the network was not going to help us survive. Since the show I have always thought to myself, if working with Paul and Jake and everyone on the show is the only thing I ever do that’s great, it’s okay because at least one time we really got something exactly right. That thought gave me the courage to take risks later in my career. Seth Rogen hadn’t really done anything, just some stand-up in Vancouver. We saw him on tape and thought, Wow, you never see someone like that on TV. Jason Segel had only done one thing before Freaks and Geeks. Our casting director, Alison Jones, found him in a high school play. We did open-call auditions in a bunch of cities and looked at thousands of people to find our characters. There were so many miracles of casting, especially Linda and John. We got lucky because the head of NBC had stepped down, so this guy Scott Sassa was the highest-level person at NBC at the time. He was more of a money person, so he just said yes to everybody. That’s why the show is good, because he didn’t know he was supposed to interfere. But then the same guy eventually canceled our show. Excerpted from Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures Copyright © 2025 by Judd Apatow. Used by permission of Random House an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Images excerpted from COMEDY NERD
