freaks and geeks

Welcome back to my Buzz Gift Guide series for all the entertainment lovers in your life. Yesterday I came up with some ideas for your coworkers, and today, I'm focusing on some splurge gifts for someone special: DVD box sets. These sets, whether a whole TV series or a collection of films, are pricier than the average gift, so they're definitely meant for that superfan who you know will cherish these DVDs forever.

I know many a Sopranos fan that would covet this giant box set that includes the complete series of the HBO show plus tons of special features — including creator David Chase and the cast talking about one of the alternate endings.

Fans of Freaks and Geeks will forever love anyone who gifts them this special "Yearbook Edition" box set. Also, the acclaimed series The Wire is available in its entirety now just in time for the holidays.

Finally, I personally would kill for this collection of films directed by Pedro Almodovar with eight movies including Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, The Flower of My Secret, and Bad Education.

Check out HolidaySugar for all of our holiday coverage and gift guides.

All of the new DVD releases hit stores (and Netflix) on Tuesdays. So each week in What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday, I sort through the best of the batch and tell you what to add to your queue. In addition to my picks below, you can now pick up Fred Claus starring Vince Vaughn and Paul Giamatti.

Hancock
Will Smith's Summer blockbuster has a clever premise at the heart of it: If we genuinely look at what life might be like for a modern-day superhero — especially one with rage issues — what challenges might this guy face? Smith manages to balance the humor of this role along with the badass superhero elements and the result is an all-around entertaining performance. I also think Jason Bateman who plays Smith's PR guy is a real highlight of the movie and reason enough to add it to your queue.

Special features include an unrated version of the movie with footage not seen in theaters, a stunts featurette, and behind-the-scenes footage.

Two more television gems up next, so read more

Because I'm on a Freaks and Geeks viewing kick, I dug these up for the loyal fans — and if you know F&G, you're a diehard — who are more geeky than freaky. There's 30 fabulous free Freaks and Geeks desktop wallpapers to choose from; I plan on rotating them according to my moods, like say, when I get picked last for dodgeball.

Oh, seeing their shiny faces makes me feel like they never went off the air and are instead living some awesome fictional life, where Lindsay Weir went with her math instincts and represented with an adult-geek-girl job, and Bill Haverchuck became my BFF.

At first glance, Freaks and Geeks and 90210 wouldn't appear to have a lot in common. One was a hyper-realistic drama that told quiet stories about high school life and was canceled after a handful of episodes. The other was a massively popular soap that looked at teenage years through a glamorous lens.

But Freaks and this Fall's bright, shiny reboot of 90210 share one big thing: their writers. Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah made a splash on Freaks and created the little-seen (but much loved, at least by me) Life as We Know It for ABC. Now, at the helm of one of this Fall's most highly anticipated shows, the two are looking to reinvent the teen show yet again.

At the TCA press tour, Sachs and Judah talked about what compelled them to take on the project and how they'll try to keep this round of Beverly Hills stories grounded in reality. Can they pull it off? I'm now more excited than ever to see them try. To see what they had to say about how they plan to meld their style with the CW's fast-paced glam, just read more

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni — cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig — took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and this week, I'm sharing some of their best stories with you. I've already told you how the series got started and passed on some tales from the set. In today's final installment, I have trivia from the show, plus news on everyone's new projects. Here goes:

• Linda Cardellini still has the green Army jacket that was practically a part of her body when she played Lindsay. "I thought about bringing it," she told the audience, "but I thought I might look like a gigantic loser."
• Sarah Hagan, who played the conservative Millie, was apparently a shocking amount like her character. Cardellini recalled that in one scene, Millie was supposed to ask Lindsay if Kim "fornicates," but Hagan (who, Cardellini recalled, hadn't talked much about sex at that time) accidentally asked if she "fornicated it." That take ended up in the show.
• Busy Philipps only did the show because she ran into Cardellini in the airport in LA shortly before the show was supposed to start. Philipps' agent had been against her taking the role of Kim Kelly because it was initially only a guest spot for the pilot, but Cardellini — whom she'd known in college — insisted that working together would be fun.
• Samm Levine and Martin Starr were both terrible about learning their lines and would typically just cram the morning of the shoot.
• Linda mastered the art of never eating food on screen; in the dinner scenes, she mostly just pushes her food around and gestures with it, which Paul Feig pointed out is "very teenage girl." She said it was all because of an early job where she didn't realize that if she ate food in one take, she'd need to eat in every take; that experience turned her off lasagna for 10 years. Philipps said it took a Freaks and Geeks scene where she ate more than a dozen donuts over the course of shooting for her to learn that lesson.

To hear my favorite story from the whole discussion and see where you can find your favorite Freaks and Geeks now, just read more

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni — cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig — took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and this week, I'm sharing some of their best stories with you. Yesterday, I told you how the series got started; today, I have tales of what it was like on set:

• While it seems like the whole cast genuinely likes each other now, that wasn't always the case. "It was really too much like high school sometimes," Cardellini said, with cliques and alliances forming and disbanding.
• Daley said at the time of the show, he was "14 years old and alone," and the big kids wouldn't let him hang out with them. But, he acknowledged, it probably would have been weird to have a young teenager hanging out with actors who were out of high school.
• Some of the nastiest disputes on the set came between Philipps and James Franco. At the time, Philipps said, they could barely even speak to each other: "It was legendary how much we hated each other."

To hear about the biggest dispute Philipps and Franco ever had, and to see where the characters might have gone had there been a season two, just read more