Freaks & Geeks the complete series
The audio commentary: the greatest love of many a modern film enthusiast. How we appreciate these glorious guided tours into the making of our favorite films! Many times we are treated to fascinating creation stories from writers, horrifying financial stories from producers, explanations from directors and even scene and method analysis from cinematographers, editors or score composers. After I finish a great film (and often even a horrible film) I nearly always click back to the special features, select ‘feature-length commentary’ and push ‘play’ again. Today, often just as fascinating as film commentaries are television commentaries. There are times though that these very commentaries that I love are nearly destroyed by one fatal error: the actors should never be invited!
Almost every time an actor appears on an audio commentary, they fill up the audio track with such inane chatter that the great work put forth by the rest of the crew is unmistakably and irreversibly degraded. I have a theory as to why this phenomenon occurs: all actors are idiots. I’m just kidding (sort of). The fact is though that the actors have one job to do in a film and that is performing in it. Outside of this cursory (albeit rather important) task, they tend to know absolutely nothing about the films’ construction. The other problem with actors on audio commentaries is quite obvious: most actors like to be the center of attention. This causes them to speak more loudly and frequently on the commentary than the people who actually matter.
One television DVD set seems to have remedied this problem… Freaks & Geeks includes multiple commentaries on every episode: one done from a technical standpoint and one done by the actors. This solves everyone’s problems because the actors are still able to pretend that they are important and the viewer (or listener) who actually cares about film can ignore them. I, for one, hope that other DVD producers follow this method and save the audio commentary from a fate worse than death: irrelevance.
