Judd Apatow

I've recently finished watching Judd Apatow's Undeclared which leaves me pretty much finished with his directorial repertoire. Undeclared won't hold as dear a place to me as Freaks and Geeks, but they are far less ripe to compare than they should be. Freaks is firmly grounded in reality, whereas Undeclared represents a step in the absurdist direction. It should have been expected after seeing 40 Year Old Virgin, yet the fact that Virgin and Freaks were so disparate, my definition of Apatow was rather nebulous. All three projects are very funny while retaining sympathetic characters, but the steps Apatow took from Freaks to Undeclared to Virgin were steps in the wrong direction. As a comedy movie, 40 Year Old Virgin stands out for having characters that were ripe for debasing that instead are respected. However, I think his material was the strongest when he focused on the characters instead of the absurdity. I don't doubt that he's gotten funnier, but he risks losing the aspect that his work stand out.
I suppose there may be two extremes in this brand of comedy. There is the Along Came Polly, Ben Stiller, we don't allow for positive things to befall the protagonist. And as explained prior there's Apatow's forte in crafting sympathetic characters in similar comedic situations. The masters of the latter would have to be the Farrelly brothers. They've made a career of picking offensive or tasteless subjects and crafting sweet comedic stories around them, neglecting the obsession with gross out humor. There's Something About Mary turned creepy stalking into a romantic comedy replete with retarded brother. Their examples, along with Apatow, shows that a little time spent on making good characters goes a long way in improving comedy. Well it should be a given that sympathetic characters can make any movie or book better, and even the most surreal or tasteless comedy should be allowed to get away with disobeying this golden rule.
For Apatow, Undeclared represented a departure from Freaks mostly in this bending of the my cherished rule. Compounded by the fact that the episodes weren't aired with any sort of continuity, there just didn't appear the same sort of respect for characters and their arcs. Besides the main character, none of the characters appeared to have the same motivations from episode to episode. Virgin, too, was full of many unsympathetic characters, yet it was able to be salvaged by Carell and Keener. If Apatow wants to continue moving in this direction, he should stick to movies where the rare sympathetic character is enough to stand out. Then again, it could all merely be a matter of the medium (TV versus cinema) and the fact that Undeclared was released without proper episode order and is decidedly more surreal than Freaks and Geeks. Until Knocked Up comes in 2007, I won't know for sure.