Advertisement

The grass is no greener in ‘Weeds’ country

Share
Times Staff Writer

In “Weeds,” debuting Sunday on Showtime, Mary-Louise Parker plays Nancy Botwin, a newly widowed mother of two who has become, in those weightless, whirlwind first stages of the grieving process, a pot supplier to her upscale planned community of Agrestic, Calif.

Nancy buys her weed by the ounce from a black family of drug dealers in L.A.; they’re presented as a wisecracking, world-weary sewing circle whom Nancy visits regularly, both to pick up more product and to get her white-girl soul scratched just where it itches.

Those scenes, particularly, can make you cringe a little. The creator of “Weeds” is Jenji Kohan, a mid-30s comedy writer with an impressive list of network credits. Here, she’s attempting a more ambitious kind of TV storytelling and ends up with a higher class of cliches. “Weeds” is populated with characters from other movies, characters from network TV shows (if network TV show characters could talk to us the way network TV writers really wanted them to) and, as further wish fulfillment, quick-to-satire thematics (e.g. rich, white bedroom communities as soulless cocoons for the depraved, the damaged and the merely running late for an appointment).

Advertisement

The result is another finely acted cable drama with great production values and the germ of an interesting idea behind it but no coherent tone or character development or story, even -- just a series of attempts to pass off creatively exaggerated behavior, the more desperate the better, as some kind of social commentary. In trying to be both playfully cartoonish and “real,” it bounces among its potential subjects without giving the viewer that reassuring sense of a controlling vision.

“This was really the chance,” Kohan told the New York Times last Sunday, “to write sophisticated, dirty, fun stuff about the kinds of characters I like to watch: really flawed, complicated people.”

What has Alan Ball done to his industry? “Weeds” is already being characterized as a “Desperate Housewives” follow-up statement (women, suburbs, desperate -- trend!), but the show feels more like the spawn of Ball’s Academy Award-winning “American Beauty” and his soon-to-conclude HBO series, “Six Feet Under,” where the answer to the question “How much more implied and expressed pain and suffering can we be witness to?” is always the same: “More.”

“Six Feet Under,” for all this, can be kind of a cathartic blast. Last week, one of the show’s main characters, Nate Fisher (Peter Krause), was killed off, and in a dream sequence that led up to the reveal, he and brother David (Michael C. Hall) get stoned in the back of a van being driven by their late father Nate Sr. (Richard Jenkins).

In “Six Feet Under” (and in “American Beauty,” for that matter), Ball uses pot to symbolize transcendent liberation, reclaiming one’s youth (and, possibly, the final magic carpet ride to the hereafter, where you smoke a fatty in the back of a van while your father drives you to the ocean).

In “Weeds,” by contrast, the pot users are hapless escapists, and Nancy, as dealers go, is a bit of a buzz kill. One of the problems with “Weeds” is how little joy the show actually seems to derive from its comedy hook, that of a hot, bemusedly grieving mom dealing dime bags from her fake designer purse on another sunny day on the soccer fields of Agrestic.

Advertisement

Well, it’s a more realistic approach, but then the show wants also to say something broader and more hackneyed: that dealing pot in Agrestic is empowering, an ongoing comment on the lies propping up Nancy’s life and those of all the adults around her -- you know, those “flawed and complicated people” lurking behind the facades. She doesn’t touch the stuff herself (preferring, in a nice detail, to take hits of iced lattes through a straw), and she has certain rules -- she’ll deal to the local pothead councilman/CPA Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon) but not to kids, and when her teenage competition, Josh (Justin Chatwin), runs afoul of this policy, she slams him up against a minivan.

“ ‘Keep kids off drugs,’ cries the pot-dealing mom,” he baits her, “but, hey, you know what? If it gets you through the night, good for you, Nance.”

She has no response.

John Waters, among many others, turned a similar, and more hilarious, trick with “Serial Mom,” in which Kathleen Turner played a serial killer in the ‘burbs. But Kohan’s not just out for fun; she seems interested in also making big-ish statements about class divides and the living-dead of planned communities. Agrestic is one of those edge-of-L.A. County areas artificially inseminated with wealth, where humanoids live (the opening credits roll over shots of cloned houses, cloned Range Rovers, cloned joggers, cloned VP of sales types walking out of a cloned Starbucks-anchored strip mall, as a dry-witted folk song called “Little Boxes” is heard). “Weeds” could be telling us something about the addiction Nancy has to this cushy life that she evidently can’t support by legal means, but it doesn’t. It presents her as a fledgling drug dealer and asks us to be dazzled by the daringness of the premise.

After the finely art-directed opening-theme sequence (fast becoming a staple of cable series), Mary-Louise Parker, playing Mary-Louise Parker, shows up. She’s one of those actresses who can deliver the gravitas thing and the sexiness thing and the all-American thing and the vulnerable thing. All with a movement of the lips or a flash of the eyes.

In “Weeds,” she’s as watchable as ever, but she’s mostly a non-participant observer. The problem is that Parker’s character, as written, doesn’t quite ring true, and the strength that Parker gives off works against the premise. What’s she doing in Agrestic anyway? Why doesn’t she sell the house and move? When first we see her, she’s at a PTA meeting, where she is recommending (to a roomful of less-attractive women gossiping about her widowhood) that all sugary soft drinks be removed from the vending machines and be replaced with bottled water and fruit juice. Standing beside her is PTA President Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins), who seems to be Nancy’s nemesis but is in fact her best friend. Later, we will see Celia replace her overweight daughter’s candy stash with laxatives and stand there, numbly, when a cargo crate falls from the sky and crashes into her bedroom and almost maims her cheating husband. Perkins is more than game for all of this, even if she appears to have wandered onto the set of “Weeds” from an even darker dark comedy about a hateful upper-middle-class mother.

The juxtaposition that “Weeds” can’t wait to make is the one between this “Spanglish”/”American Beauty”/”Stepford Wives” world and the salvation of Nancy’s earthier pot suppliers, who include a big-mama character, Heylia (Tonye Patano), and her son Conrad (Romany Malco). In these scenes, the story pauses for expository statement-making (so the black folk can riff about Enron and WorldCom; it’s like a Chris Rock special has broken out), while Nancy stands there, stands there for all of us (white folk). The whole thing is well-intentioned but absurdly so, this idea that going to see your dealer in the ‘hood is part therapy. “God, that smells good,” Nancy says, referring to Heylia’s cornbread baking in the oven. “I miss carbs.” By the end of the episode, she’s crying on the drug supplier’s shoulder.

Advertisement

For now, though, her biggest goal is making money. Making money so she can keep her full-time maid, Lupita (Renee Victor), and her big house. It will lead her to begin a pot-baking business after a visit to a medicinal marijuana cafe that, Nancy says dreamily, is like “the Whole Foods of pot” (Nealon, whose easygoing mien in “Weeds” is consistently a relief, pulls off the tougher joke about the place, telling Nancy: “It’s like Amsterdam, only better, because you don’t have to visit the Anne Frank House and pretend to be all sad and stuff.”).

Nancy has to keep pace with her 15-year-old son, Silas (Hunter Parrish), and her 8-year-old, Shane (Alexander Gould), both of whom share a fascination with a certain Wilderness Channel show called “Bear Hunt.”

In the fourth episode, Nancy’s brother-in-law shows, and it turns out to be another fine actor, Justin Kirk, who is immediately given his pay-cable bona fides through outrageous displays of sexual acting-out with a minor. Three or four scenes later, his weirdness is already becoming tiresome.

The Damaged People of Cable TV: Are there enough of them now to form a softball team? I’ll take Billy from “Six Feet Under,” you can have Russell Tupper from “Huff.” If the trend grew out of an admirable desire to make cable series truthful where the networks aren’t, it’s starting to feel just as formula as the formula it was fleeing from.

And yet, for all the mess it makes of its premise, “Weeds” is a show that might yet find itself. Kohan’s instinct to build a show around the culture of weed, using a planned community as a backdrop, isn’t a bad one. But to steal a line from “The Big Lebowski,” that gold standard of pot comedies, the show could really use a rug to hold the room together.

*

‘Weeds’

Where: Showtime

When: 11 p.m. Sunday

Mary-Louise Parker...Nancy Botwin

Celia Hodes...Elizabeth Perkins

Doug Wilson...Kevin Nealon

Andy Botwin...Justin Kirk

Heylia James...Tonye Patano

Conrad Shepard...Romany Malco

Silas Botwin...Hunter Parrish

Shane Botwin...Alexander Gould

Executive producer and creator Jenji Kohan.

Advertisement