A while ago, I don't know how long but it doesn't matter, our friend John Smith told us in addition to hosting Geeks Who Drink at the Highball he was going to start hosting a thing called TV Dinner on Monday nights with his Geeks Who Drink co-host James Pound. The idea was for people to come to the Highball and hang out for a couple of hours while watching some of our favorite TV shows from when we were younger. They started with three weeks of Saved by the Bell and over time did a bunch of other shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a line-up of classic Snick shows, Arrested Development and finished up with the best of Judd Apatow which was mostly Freaks and Geeks and a few episodes of The Critic. We attended pretty regularly at first and took part in a lot of the between-episode-games like designing an album cover for a Zack Attack Greatest Hits or the classic Bluth Family Chicken Dance-Off. Shaun usually attended with us and was always active in tweeting along with the episodes.
Over time we stopped going as frequently. It seemed we were always busy on Monday nights or we didn't have the money to spend on it. TV Dinner itself was free, but we would inevitably spend money on drinks and often eat there just because of the timing. I guess attendance was never quite what the Highball was hoping for and they decided to stop doing it. Last night was the last one.
We hadn't talked about going, but when we heard it was ending Shaun, my wife and I knew we had to be there. By this point James had been hosting it by himself for a while and we wanted to help give him a good last night to go out on. Plus he was showing Freaks and Geeks and The Critic, so what's not to love?
We showed up and enjoyed some snacks and drinks. We laughed at inappropriate tweets from other audience members, we made paper airplanes and left a mess of them all over the stage. Even our friend Mandy joined us one last time. The last episode of the last night of TV Dinner was the finale of Freaks and Geeks. If you've never seen the show I highly recommend it. It only ran one short season and the ending was so bittersweet it kills me that there weren't more episodes. To me it feels very similar to the final episode of Home Movies. It was the perfect episode to end TV Dinner with and everyone had a really good time.
So thanks John and James for hosting a really great show even if the number didn't always reflect it and even if we didn't always come. And thanks James for bringing it to a close in a most appropriate manner. I guess this means we'll have to make it out to Geeks Who Drink more than once a year now.
I'm glad I went along! I will miss having the opportunity to go to this, even if I only went a couple of times.
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