Paul Feig and Judd Apatow turned down MTV's offer to bring back Freaks and Geeks for Season 2 because of the low budget

Collider

“It was a weird time for me because my mom died two days before we got cancelled," says Feig in an interview with Collider. "So I was a little out of sorts, but I remember hearing that (MTV offered to pick us up). We probably just had to lose so much stuff and music and budgets. We were already always strained on our budget as it was.” Feig says a smaller budget would've meant losing much of the cast, but he admits the show's staff was also exhausted.“I was so thrown and we'd worked so hard on that show. I mean, you say it looked like a movie, that's really how we treated it," he says. "So, we were ready to drop at the end of those 18 episodes. And then my mom dies, and I think I had a moment of like, ‘I can't even deal with any of this.’ And then very quickly after the decisions were made, then you're kind of like, ‘Oh my God, what did we do? Could we have pulled it off if we had done it?’” Feig does admit, though, that there are times he thinks that a second season of Freaks and Geeks could've produced more stellar episodes.