[SCREAMING]
Sweaty piehole!
[SPEAKING SPANISH] No Kelly Clarkson!
Judd Apatow is arguably the most important comedy producer
in the last half century.
Through a slew of highly personal projects,
he defined the American comedic sensibility
throughout the 2000s.
He made stars out of non-traditional actors
and has had a longevity rarely seen in Hollywood's ecosystem.
I don't know how to put this, but I'm kind of a big deal.
And yet, after this meteoric rise,
everything seemingly changed.
Judd Apatow was born in Queens, New York
but raised Syosset, Long Island.
After his parents were divorced at the age of 12,
his mother took a job as a hostess at a local Comedy Club
where the young Apatow would meet many
of his early childhood heroes.
This would prove to be a formative experience for him
on multiple fronts.
He was able to discuss the process of creation
with industry stalwarts, made connections,
and begin to cultivate a personal approach to comedy.
Apatow has said in interviews since that he
thinks his mother took a job as a hostess
in order to facilitate this exact creative brokerage.
However, they never actually spoke about it.
For Apatow, humor became his salvation.
He had an aching hole in his heart
from his parents' divorce that just kept widening.
Comedy helps numb this pain, and it was a way
to find an adoptive family.
This sounds like a simplistic reduction
of a person's experience of finding a community,
however it would become in many ways
the governing principle of his life.
Throughout the late '80s and early '90s,
Apatow bounced from between stand
up comedy, writing gigs, and befriending the comedic elite.
His first roommate when he moved to Los Angeles
was Adam Sandler.
One of his closest friends early on
was Jim Carrey, who he met through performing
at comedy clubs.
He began cementing himself as a steady dependable
worker in the comedy trenches.
After writing on The Larry Sanders Show
and producing on a few feature films, namely The Cable Guy
and doing an uncredited rewrite on Liar Liar,
[SCREAMING]
Apatow had his big creative breakthrough, Freaks and Geeks.
Created by Paul Feig and produced by Apatow,
the show didn't even get through one season.
It followed a group of and burnouts in 1980 and '81
as they attempted to navigate the complex ecosystem
of high school and young adulthood.
Unfortunately, it was canceled after only 12
of the 18 episodes that were shot had aired.
You cut me off mid-funk.
The airing schedule for these final few episodes
were so erratic and unpredictable they might
as well have never been on TV.
For Apatow, this was the ultimate defeat.
From his perspective, the powers that be
weren't seeing the creative alchemy on display.
Apatow had been involved in a lot of projects at this point.
He knew when something was good and when it was bad.
The incomprehensible aspect of this situation for him
was that Freaks and Geeks was great, but no one was watching.
Thus the plug got pulled.
From his perspective, this was the beginning of a Renaissance
that was stopped before it had even gotten a chance
to be in its prime.
With a cast almost exclusively with unknowns,
he felt like he had truly discovered something great.
James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Linda Cardellini,
and Busy Philipps would all go on
to become major stars in their own right.
When asked about that failure, Apatow responded "the idea
that someone would end that led to me internalizing
all this rage.
I got a herniated disk, I was on all of these Vicodins.
You do kind of lose your mind in grief.
Because as a child of divorce, the show was a family.
I couldn't really tolerate the randomness of the dissolution
of the family.
Obviously the movies were an attempt
to tap into what was happening creatively
with all those different people on the show."
After Freaks and Geeks was canceled,
Apatow went to Jason Segel and Seth Rogen
and said something that would change all of their lives
forever.
He told them that they both needed
to write their own material.
Apatow felt responsible for these kids' future.
Rogen literally dropped out of high school
to be in Freaks and Geeks.
This advice turned out to be a prophetic for the group
of Freaks and Geeks alumni.
Apatow's short lived project Undeclared
kept the band together for a little while with Rogen
writing and acting on the show.
However, starting in 2004, the creative run
that Apatow and his crew would go on
would be almost unparalleled.
Anchorman, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights,
Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard, Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
Pineapple Express, and Funny People.
Hands down, it is one of the most culturally impactful eras
that any creative clique has ever had in comedy.
That escalated quickly.
More impressive than the financial and critical
accolades that were heaped upon the films
is the fact that for nearly the entire decade of the 2000s,
they defined what funny was.
They owned the raunchy, swear word laden toilet humor world.
You poop mouth with poop out of your mouth.
Humor in the late 1990s was pretty straight-laced.
It was mostly a genre that thrived on the television set.
However, Apatow and his crew of nerdy outsiders
redefined the conception of what would succeed at the box office
and how Americans would view raunchy humor.
And then the one film that would forever change Apatow's life
was released, Funny People.
Debuting in the summer of 2009, Funny People
is a dark comedy about the toll fame takes on people.
It follows Adam Sandler, who plays George Simmons,
a middle aged stand-up turned sellout movie star
who, despite his exorbitant wealth,
finds life to be empty and gray.
After being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia,
he takes the young and aspiring stand up
Ira Wright played by Seth Rogen under his wing,
and the two end up connecting with Simmons' ex-fiancee.
It's a dark and probing film that
marks a steady maturation in the themes and biographical
nature of Apatow's work.
And yet the wider public didn't care.
The film bombed, making only $71.6 million
on a production budget of $75 million.
The film's dark and cynical view of love, relationships,
and the eternal question of is any of this worth
it did not land with audiences.
The man known for making gobs of money off sex jokes
wasn't able to convince the wider
public that his highly personal dark comedy was
worth their time.
And because of that, things were never the same for Apatow.
Yes, the films that he directed like Trainwreck, This
Is 40, and King of Staten Island were relatively successful,
but they don't have the same personal grit to them.
They don't have the biting insight
that the post Freaks and Geeks wave of creativity had.
They feel less like he's actively
taking a vested interest in making
sure these people he loves and care about are taken care
of and more like he's a movie producer trying
to make sure the movies and TV shows he produces don't suck.
He's a creative godfather now.
He's not the central voice at the helm of these pictures.
He's a person the studio have faith in,
and he's trying to use it in a positive manner.
2005 was a long time ago, and we've
culturally moved on from stoner comedies
and hang out bro down sessions.
I wouldn't have expected Apatow to keep
making movies that were exactly like the films he made
in the 2000s, but it really does seem
like the failure of Funny People was so personal.
He shielded a part of himself.
He didn't want to be vulnerable to public anymore.
He's fine helping other people to show us
all their deepest, darkest flaws, but for him, he did it.
It hurt, and so he's going to protect himself going forward.
Ultimately, they say conflict is the essence of drama,
and in the 2000s, Apatow was fighting
to keep his adopted family together.
He felt like the magic on the set of Freaks and Geeks
was something that needed to be fostered.
He wanted to protect the people he creatively held dear,
and that made his films brilliant.
They were about something, even when they were just
about stoner dudes being friends.
I know this sounds weird, but can we be best friends?
Just us, for real?
I think we should all be best friends.
We should be.
And now as a man who's 54 years old with children of his own,
he's got other priorities.
His daughter Maude is on Euphoria,
and Iris is in his recent film The Bubble.
He doesn't need to fight to protect
the people he loves anymore.
He can just flex his Hollywood mega-producer muscle
and guarantee that they're taken care of.
Seth Rogen is one of the biggest names on the planet.
He writes, directs, and produces his own films and TV shows.
Jason Segel is the face of one of the biggest sitcoms ever,
and Linda Cardellini has headlined multiple shows
and is in the MCU.
So what does Judd Apatow have to fight for anymore?
He's exorbitantly wealthy, has immense legacy,
and is considered one of the greatest comedy
producers of all time.
For much of the 2000s, Apatow and his friends
had a stranglehold on American culture.
They were everywhere.
Now Apatow and his colleagues, they're
a group of professionals trying to tell stories,
and maybe that's enough.
Well, that's all we have this week.
Will you be revisiting Knocked Up anytime soon?
Comment down below and let us know.
And as always, please subscribe in order
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[MUSIC PLAYING]