Progressive Wednesday

The TGIF Movie Review: Weeds

Okay, so, this week I’m cheating a bit, but since I help make the rules around these here parts, I’m cool with it. I watched and I watched (and I watched…), but I didn’t see a flick this week that registered even a 6 on my Dig-O-Meter. So instead, I’m going to review my new fave TV show, Weeds.

Weeds is a Showtime original series centered around the Botwin family. As the series begins, Jonah Botwin, the father of the clan, has recently died, and this proves to be a central conflict for the rest of the family. Nancy Botwin, played both innocently and wryly by Mary-Louise Parker, has a choice to make: either continue living in Agrestic, an upper-class, SoCal, suburban neighborhood, and maintain the lifestyle she and her two boys, Silas and Shane, have come to expect and appreciate, or not. For now, she chooses the former. And how, pray tell, does she plan to pull this off? Not by selling dandelions. No, a different weed — flower tops, mary jane, meggie, gong, blaze, chronic, kaff, sweet lucy, and my personal favorite, zambi.

So, sell pot she does — to the denizens of Agrestic, to college students, to friends of friends. She battles her own concerns about her safety, the safety of her children, and how to hide the money from the tax-man. She battles her desires to move beyond her husband’s death and to intensely pine for him at the same time. She battles the law and the ways it blurs in and out of what’s “right.” Nancy is a fighter, a confused, conflicted, and confined fighter.

Maybe more importantly, this show is freaking hilarious (in large part thanks to two neighbors played pitch-perfect by Kevin Nealon and Elizabeth Perkins). It’s sad and smart and sassy. It’s a show teeming with cultural criticism. It goes after suburbia’s unspoken pledge of homogeneity and its myth of perfection and purity with a sometimes subtle and other times brutal hand. It’s a show about family and loss, sex and religion, race and childhood. It’s a show that tackles the double-edged way we view drugs, particularly marijuana: many of us inhale it secretly (and some of us shamelessly or shamefully), and yet many of us also view it as a devilish gateway drug. This show is by no means propaganda for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and at the same time it looks at the phrase “Just say no to drugs” like the hyperbolic slogan that it is (I mean, aspirin is a drug, n’est si pas?).

You can rent or buy season uno on DVD, and I urge you to do just that. I’ll confidently call it the best show on television — better than the Sopranos (thanks to its large heart) and yes, believe it or not, it’s even better than Deal or No Deal. (Editor’s note: Deal or No Deal is to television as edible panties are to evening wear.)

I couldn’t find a good promo for the show online, so here are a few clips that do Weeds its deserved justice (by the way, there’s a touch of foul lingo and “adult themes” in ‘em, so, you know, steer clear if you’re more of a PG sort of person):