Review of Showtime's Weeds

The hook of the NBC’s show Weeds is the theme song “ Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds. The song is a brillant and searing critique of suburbia. She sings in a folksy soprano “ little boxes/ on hillside/ little boxes made out of tick-tacky/little boxes on the hillside/ and they all look just the same” as a montage of images of the same people go into coffee shops, pull out of the driveway and going on morning jogs. This captures the aim of Weeds exactly.
The show is centered around Nancy Botwin, a suburban housewife played by a sexy Mary Louise Parker, who, after facing the death of her husband and no way to support her two sons, turns towards the business of selling pot. The entire plot is centered on Nancy’s budding career as a stoic marijuana dealer and the complications this imposes. The cast of characters provides a comic depiction of the archetypal suburban population. There is Doug, who is played by Kevin Nealon, a hopelessly aloof dope smoking CPA who is Nancy’s best customer and city councilor, Celia a frigid, bitter housewife who is also the president of the PTA but hates her own kids. There are also her two rebellious sons, Silas the emo teenager who is in love with a deaf girl, and Shane, an ostracized middle school outcast who is dealing with his father’s death by shooting mountain lions and assaulting his nemesis with pink goo via with a super soaker. The suppliers that provide Nancy with her marijuana are a little too stereotypical and serve to illustrate juxtaposition between white middle class suburbia and black lower middle class life in a way that borders on offensive. The fast talking, money grubbing black matriarch, the pregnant young women whose only purpose is gossiping, and the handsome hypersexual black man who has an affinity for old cars and Pilates are unoriginal and unimaginative. I get that the purpose is to highlight a disjuncture between the two lifestyles, but the characters do not add complexity and therefore seems irrelevant and one-dimensional.
Weeds wouldn’t have been able to develop character complexity if the plot wasn’t strictly centered on the monotony of everyday life. There are no melodramatic moments in the first season of Weeds. The fall back drama of infidelity in television is turned on its head when Celia, who has found out her husband is cheating on her with a cute Asian tennis instructor, proceeds to get drunk with her and halfheartedly calls her a slut while tipping her glass toward the bartender for a refill. The most climatic moment of the first season is Nancy, who while picking up marijuana at her dealers house experiences a drive by shooting. The absurdity of suburbia would not have been possible if there was more action. The off kilter humor of that makes the show what it is, is illustrated perfectly in the scene, where Doug and Nancy’s slacker brother in law that tries to fill in for father figure share a bowl and muse on complexity of language. While trying to decide what the best word for “taint” is Lupita, the household maid is asked “ What is thing called between the dick and the asshole?’ and she replies “The coffee table.”

The show, at first watch is about a mother who partakes in the illicit career as a drug dealer. However, it uses this as a jumping off point to expose the figurative” weeds” that stubbornly pops up in the quest for perfection and normalcy that suburbia is supposed to represent. It is a show as much about the addiction to middle class comfort as it is about the addiction to marijuana. The characters seem absurd but not unlike the people one would meet if the suburbs of any major city, or anyone for that matter. The show makes it clear that everyone would be better off if we embraced our neuroses. Nancy and her dysfunctional crew serve to remind us that letting go of the pursuit of perfection and facing the weeds of our own ridiculous lives are in the long run, are a much better high.