Wild doings in gated America

When last we saw Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) -- the pot-dealing, suburban-widow heroine of Showtime’s attractive, black-ish sitcom “Weeds” -- she had just discovered that her new boyfriend was a DEA agent. And when next we see her, as we shall tonight when Season 2 of this series gets underway, she is exactly where we left her.

This is one of those series that at once wants to picture ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances yet also to reveal people who follow extraordinary pursuits as essentially ordinary -- two slightly but significantly different things. This process of simultaneous glamorization and de-glamorization is the basis not only of “The Sopranos,” “Big Love” and “Six Feet Under” but also of reality shows like “The Osbournes” and those that attempt to transmute the “real lives” of bounty hunters, drag racers, roller-derby queens and so on, into something rich and strange and yet familiar, in dramatically conventional terms.

“Weeds” also shares the brief of all premium cable series -- to court controversy, to push buttons, to stretch envelopes and, especially, to show naked people having sex. But every show has a self-selecting audience, and this is one that, by definition, has no problem with such things, or with a family comedy about drugs. “Weeds” can be as outrageous as it likes, and yet it can outrage no one, except perhaps those who wouldn’t watch it in the first place.

I am not one of those people, and I like “Weeds” quite a bit, even granting that it often does not make sense. It’s never clear why Nancy finds it necessary to stay in gated, upscale, barren Agrestic, a place where she doesn’t fit or have any real friends (apart from the reliably self-involved Celia, played by Emmy nominee Elizabeth Perkins) and where her oddball younger son is continually bullied -- or why she strives to maintain a lifestyle to which she does not seem at all attached. It seems like cheating: She is too good for her milieu, and therefore heroic by default, just as her late husband, as glimpsed on old videotape, is head and shoulders above any other male in the series -- except for outsiders Conrad (the wonderful Romany Malco), who comes from the ghetto, and Peter (Martin Donovan), the DEA agent. Neither is it clear why she is so spectacularly unprepared to get a job or so confused about what’s good for her kids that she risks losing them. (The risks this season get bigger, as Nancy graduates from selling pot to growing it, and even riskier, because she has gone into business with people she herself calls “idiots.”

The plural title -- if we take it as something other than just a more elegant alternative to the singular “Weed,” after which I feel impelled to add the word “dude” -- can be interpreted to refer not just to pot but also to things that grow wild in an otherwise ordered garden. That’s the series’ bigger theme, the discontents of suburbia, although the accompanying idea that inside their “hermetically sealed houses,” the burbs are awash in hypocrisy and hanky panky is old and shallow, no more recent or penetrating than “Peyton Place.” Although it’s easy to hate suburban sprawl and gated communities, it’s dangerous to generalize about the people who live there; even the most apparently conformist human is complicated beyond the means of a TV show to fully express. And the fact is that, notwithstanding that the theme song is “Little Boxes,” Malvina Reynolds’ jaunty attack on conformity, nearly everyone “Weeds” focuses on, is a weirdo.

As in many series, early episodes were too insistently ruled by the premise, and there were a lot of strings and gears showing. But about midway through the first season, the premise began to recede a little and orations gave way to conversations, following the meandering logic of actual talk (and the even more wayward logic of stoned talk) while actually getting a lot of information across. The focus shifted to the characters and their relationships, characters who seemed, as time went on, more stumbled-upon -- characters who would be leading their lives whether we were there to watch them or not. The story did not always live up to them -- Celia’s bout with cancer last year, for instance, seems to have been created primarily to give her a reason to go wild and sleep with Conrad -- but you didn’t always notice, given the eminently distracting and bountiful pleasures of the execution.

It’s perhaps appropriate to the subject matter that the show’s main appeal is sensual rather than cerebral, grounded in a host of superb performances. (One of its five Emmy nominations is for casting, and it’s well deserved.) Kevin Nealon, who never struck me as particularly amusing on “Saturday Night Live” or anywhere else, is consistently good as Nancy’s accountant-customer-business partner and especially funny in his scenes with the excellent Justin Kirk as her wooly brained, id-driven brother-in-law, who this year has become a rabbinical student to escape being sent to fight in Iraq -- they make a kind of upper-middle-class, very white Cheech & Chong. Tonye Patano continues fine as Nancy’s connection, and Shoshanna Stern is wonderfully deep in her short scenes as Nancy’s older son’s girlfriend. And there is Donovan, long beloved of Hal Hartley, and a nice match for Parker: The two simmer at the same low boil. I could go on: Everyone’s good.

But Parker, who won a Golden Globe this year, is the heart of it all: Her performance largely defines how you read the others, and she plays it like Alice in Wonderland, her eyes growing large with wonder or excitement or disappearing protectively under half-lowered lids. (She has the sexiest squint since Clint Eastwood.) She has the ability to make all around her seem like a dream and to walk her character untouched through strange and unsanitary places. It makes her good to know.

*

‘Weeds’

Where: Showtime

When: 10 tonight

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17)