On The Tube
Freaks, Geeks And Snoops
Meet Samm Levine and Gina Gershon, two up-and-coming stars on new fall TV series.
a
MICHAEL ELKIN
Special to the Jewish News
et out of Dodge!" is more
than a mantra for marshals
of the Old West; it's a
command for freaks and
geeks in high school, a matter of life
and death.
Those who have suffered the
ignominy of being targeted by a
dodge ball in a ritual of high school
that only a sadist can satisfy know that
there's no recess from pain.
Just ask the freaks and geeks of the
very funny — and highly acclaimed
— new NBC show set in an unnamed
Michigan town in the '80s. Freaks and
Geeks, airing 8 p.m. Saturdays, was
created by Michigan native Paul Feig.
He grew up as "a tall, skinny, geeky
kid" in Mt. Clemens.
The 1980 Chippewa High School
graduate notes that while most teen
programs focus on the beautiful peo-
ple, Freaks and Geeks acknowledges
that all of us feel like outsiders from
time to time. "It's much funnier to be
realistic," he says.
These are the kids the jocks made
sport of, the nebbishes who wore pen-
cils down to the nubs, the do-gooders
whose only chance at a date was buy-
ing a calendar.
But the freaks and geeks of the '80s
have graduated big time, finding pros-
perity and peace in their PCs.
Welcome to the heroes of the '90s.
Attired in a tie and jacket, Samm
Levine is no leviathan: At 17, he
seems much younger, one of the geek
chorus that makes this series sing to
the hearts of so many former high
schoolers with lowlights for memories.
The former Ft. Lee, N.J., resident
is fortified for questions about playing
the wuss in a world of wedgies.
Actually, Levine got his comic
comeuppance at his first gig, playing
that tavern of talmudical ritual also
known as the bar mitzvah. That's
where he did his first-stand up — but
not at the bimah. "They told me I
couldn't do that," says Levine. "I wait-
ed until the reception."
What was he — chopped liver? "It
had just been something I wanted to
do, and I had written a few jokes and
10/1
1999
88 Detroit Jewish News
•
kids seem to be the outsiders," the
freaks and geeks, he says.
Of course, those odd men — and
women — out often grow up to be in
controlling positions.
Revenge of the nerds? Triumph of
the timid? Just look to the Hollywood
Hills, where the sign seems to point in
Jews' direction. "In some things we're
better," smiles Levine with show biz
savvy.
Like what? "Like show business,"
says the star of a show that kids and
their parents can freak out over.
0
ck..;;.•$.
performed them," he remembers.
Take my talks — please! "I did the
style of Richard Jeni," Levine says
with a sensitive, serious punim that
pleads to be pinched.
In a pinch, he can relate to Neal,
his character on the show, a hilarious
nasal-voiced sci-fi fanatic. "We're both
wise guys. We're both a little bit of
instigators," he says.
.
Wise guy, but not a wise-ass. "I
think Neal and I are parallel, just a lit-
tle bit separated," he adds.
Separate and unequal. Levine is
more the outgoing kind of guy who
got out a lot doing stand-up as a teen
at such New York hotspots as
Caroline's, Stand Up NY and the
Gotham Comedy Club.
This young entertainer, who once
bviously, Gina Gershon
would have no problem
answering the infamous
Barbara Walters question:
"If I were a tree, what kind would I
be?"
A maple has to be the answer.
Why?
"Oh, I'm really just a big sap," says
the luscious and lovely actress, whose
response is actually to a question
about why she always plays such
tough characters.
The softness that is evident in per-
son didn't show in Showgirls — in
which she co-starred with another
Jewish actress, Farmington Hills native
Elizabeth Berkley — or in Bound, in
which she played a lethal lesbian up to
no good.
Snooping around for personal info
about her is appropriate here; after all,
Gershon is portraying a punk pri-
vate detective with a public
appeared on TV's Discovery
chip on her shoulder in
Kids, is indeed a real discov- Martin Starr, John
the typically David E.
ery — gracefully funny and Daley and Samm
Kelly-eccentric Snoops, air-
Levine in "Freaks
refined, able to deliver a
ing 9 p.m. Sundays this
8
punch line with a two-fisted and Geeks," airing
fall on ABC.
p.m. Saturdays on
wallop.
As the savvy and sexual-
NBC.
The young star, who likes
ly steamy Glenn Hall, the
his yo-yo-tricks, knows
character wears her sexi-
what it's like to be up and down in
ness as a badge of honor. She is "Ally
life. As one of only five Jewish kids in
McBeal" with McAttitude, embodying
his high school, he understood the
her role with rough edges, fleshing out
role of outsider in and out.
a character who is all bark and all bite.
Indeed, adds this teen teeming with
So what's a nice Jewish woman
potential, being a smart Jewish kid
from Los Angeles doing playing such a
just seems to confine one to the out-
punch-in-the-eye private eye?
sider's role in some school situations,
"I just take parts as they come
where dumbing down is considered an
along," says Gershon with an inno-
up, "cool" way to be, and insults
cence that Hall would never be guilty
about academic prowess can smart.
of.
"Sorry to say that a lot of Jewish