Freaks and Geeks co-creators Judd Apatow and Paul Feig have revealed the show almost got a second season at MTV.
Apatow recently told Collider that MTV had offered to produce a second season of the show, after NBC cancelled it after just 18 episodes.
“When the show was canceled, there was an offer from MTV to continue making the show at a much lower budget,” Apatow said. “And we all decided we didn’t want to do a weaker version of the show.”
Paul Feig went on to add that making the show on a smaller budget would mean losing “so much stuff and music and budgets. We were already always strained on our budget as it was.”
He went on: “I was so thrown and we’d worked so hard on that show. I mean, you say it looked like a movie, that’s really how we treated it. So, we were ready to drop at the end of those 18 episodes.”
The filmmaker also said that his mother died two days before NBC cancelled the show. “I think I had a moment of like, ‘I can’t even deal with any of this,’” he said. “And then very quickly after the decision [to turn MTV down was] made, then you’re kind of like, ‘Oh my God, what did we do? Could we have pulled it off if we had done it?’”
He added: “There’s moments so many times I go like, ‘Wow, we just got away with these 18 episodes,’ and I’m sure we would’ve done other great episodes, another great season. But at the same time, it’s set in amber now and there’s something lovely about that.”
