My sister Rebecca watches television almost as compulsively as I watch movies. “Do you watch any TV at all?” she often asks, in an incredulous tone that suggests not watching TV is some kind of crime. The fact is, I watch stuff on TV all the time, but mainly movies and sports. It’s not that I don’t like television, although I don’t particularly care for most of it. There’s actually some good stuff out there, and I’ve found that the easiest way to discover it is the same way I discover movies: through Netflix.

In recent years, my biggest discovery has been the late, great 1999 television show “Freaks and Geeks,” which revolves around siblings Sam and Lindsay Weir and their circle of weird and quirky friends at McKinley High School in Michigan. It’s a period piece, set in the early 1980s, and it makes terrific use of the schlocky, overproduced rock that was popular at the time. If there’s ever been a better use of “Come Sail Away” by Styx than in the first episode of “Freaks and Geeks,” I can’t think of it. The show was critically acclaimed and also a failure, canceled midway through the season, and I wonder if it was a little too realistic to catch on with mainstream America. I mean, how vividly does anyone really want to remember their high school years? The main characters on “Freaks and Geeks” are the types of teenagers who occupy the fringes of most TV shows or movies about adolescents, if they’re portrayed at all: gawky boys who like science fiction, gifted students, the burnouts who will be lucky if they graduate. I feel like these were the sorts of people I knew in high school, and every episode contained moments of hilarious and uncomfortable truth. Anyway, I love the show, and it remains the only thing I actually own on DVD.

“Freaks and Geeks” was produced by Judd Apatow, who has since gone on to greater things. He directed the hit movies the “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” and also produced “Superbad” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which opened last weekend. I haven’t seen “Knocked Up,” which is currently positioned at 19 in my Netflix queue, but I thought “Virgin” and “Superbad” were hilarious. So on Sunday I checked out “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which stars the likable Jason Segal, who played endearing screw-up Nick Andopolis on “Freaks and Geeks.” That’s one thing I really appreciate about Judd Apatow — he seems to think it’s his duty to turn the “Freaks and Geeks” cast into movie stars.

I’m sorry to say that “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” was a bit of disappointment. There seemed to be something wrong with the pacing; the jokes came too slowly, or there was too much space in between gags, or perhaps the movie was simply a little too predictable. You knew (SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS MOVIE!) that Jason Segal’s character would go to Hawaii to recover from his break-up with his girlfriend, discover, to his horror, that she was vacationing there with her new boyfriend, an idiotic British rock singer, and then fall in love with the beautiful hotel desk clerk. OK, fine. But when a movie is that predictable, it helps if the jokes are extremely funny. And in this case they weren’t funny enough. The film was filled with Apatow trademarks: humiliating sexual encounters, male nudity, vulgar conversations about sex. I found myself laughing, but not as often as I would have liked. Not long ago I read an interview with Judd Apatow where he discussed his newfound success in the movie business; he remarked that he would never do anything in film that would be as good as “Freaks and Geeks.” I think he’s right. Don’t go see “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” — rent the first disc of “Freaks and Geeks” instead.

Speaking of movies about humiliating sexual encounters, I watched the 1989 documentary “Heavy Petty” on DVD this weekend. “Heavy Petting” basically splices sex education films from the 1950s with old Hollywood teen films, interspersed with interviews from artists and activists such as David Byrne from “Talking Heads,” Abbie Hoffman, Spalding Gray and Sarah Bernhard, who recount their first sexual experiences and riff on American culture and social mores. The documentary is fitfully amusing — it’s targeted at the sort of people who think watching “Reefer Madness” is a total gas — but it’s worth getting the DVD for the extras, which include full interviews with many of the celebrities featured in the film. These interviews are fascinating; the one with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, seated side by side and looking totally uncomfortable, is a classic. “Don’t you want to be loved?” Ginsberg asks the reticent Burroughs. “I don’t want to be loved,” Burroughs replies. “Except by my cat.”

Out on DVD this week are two decent films: “The Savages” and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” both of which feature the incomparable Philip Seymour Hoffman. “The Savages” is the sad, touching and bleakly humorous story of two siblings (Hoffman and Laura Linney, who was also excellent) forced to place their estranged father in a nursing home. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which was written by “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin,” tells the story of Rep. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks, in a fun performance), a liberal Texas Democrat who works with a cantankerous CIA agent (Hoffman) to get Afghan fighters the weapons they need to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. It’s a true story, and the movie is breezy and light — maybe a little too breezy and light, considering the subject matter. But I enjoyed it nonetheless, while wishing it cut a little deeper.

There’s a good interview about the film with the real Charlie Wilson on Salon.com. You can find it here.