Weeds of Suburbia, Part One

Quick Facts:

Genre: Comedy

Run Time: 283 minutes

Accolades/Awards: Golden Globe Winner for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy (Mary-Louise Parker)

Starring: Mary-Louise Parker, Elizabeth Perkins, Kevin Nealon, Justin Kirk, Hunter Parrish, Alexander Gould, Romany Malco

My Opinion:

I have heard a lot about Showtime's "Weeds", a comedy series about a suburban housewife dealing marijuana from her house. Having been deployed to the Middle East for a while, I didn't have access to Showtime, and I didn't think I was missing much. Having returned to the States, I ordered the first season of "Weeds" on DVD to see what the fuss was all about. I am very glad I did.

Season one of "Weeds" introduces us to Nancy Botwin (Parker), a young housewife living in a suburb called Agrestic in southern California. Agrestic is a cookie-cutter community of professionals, their pilates-attending unemployed wives and 2.5 children. Nancy is newly widowed, her husband dying unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving the Botwin family with nothing to fall back on. Determined to disallow her family from falling apart, Nancy decides to deal marijuana to a few friends. A very small scale "business", Nancy seems to start thriving, which is helped immensely by her sweet predisposition.

Enter Andy Botwin (Kirk), Nancy's black sheep brother-in-law, newly returned from Alaska. Andy is jobless, with no aspirations or abilities, and he ends up mooching off Nancy and indirectly taking care of Nancy's two sons: Silas (Parrish), who is 15 and Shane (Gould), who is 10. Silas is a popular, good-looking kid, while Shane is a smart nerd, trying to find his way in school without the much needed help of his father.

Nancy, a small scale drug dealer, buys all her marijuana from a black racist family, which includes Conrad (Malco), seemingly the only non-racist member of the family, who decides to help Nancy with her struggling business. Conrad has to help Nancy covertly, as his aunt (Tonye Patano) is strongly opposed to any help provided to the "white woman". Nancy's business grows, largely due to Nancy's trustworthiness and likeable personality, and she sets up a fake business with the help of her customer and accountant (who is also a councilman) Doug Wilson (Nealon), and her lawyer Dean Hodes (Andy Milder), the husband of Nancy's sometimes-friend Celia (Perkins). While Dean is likeable, Celia is hated by just about everyone in Agrestic, due to her difficult personality and arrogance. Nancy's children still in the dark about their mother's activities, Nancy opens a bakery (which she calls a fakery) as a cover for her growing marijuana sales. By this time Nancy realizes that she can not meet all the customer demands by herself, and she enrolls her no-good brother-in-law, Andy, who is all too happy to be involved in marijuana dealing.

"Weeds" is an amazingly fresh and well-acted series that is very easy to get hooked on. Mary-Louise Parker does a magnificent job as Nancy, a weak housewife whose only strength seems to come from the need for her family's survival. Just as Nancy is likeable, Celia (Perkins) is the opposite, and I couldn't think of anyone better for the role of Celia than Elizabeth Perkins, who did a fantastic job. In fact, the casting director did a marvelous job picking actors for different roles: anyone but Kevin Nealon would have destroyed the character of Doug - always stoned, very immature and very smart middle aged man, and anyone but Justin Kirk would have been wrong in the role of the permanent adolescent character of Andy Botwin. Taking a completely different turn from all the other series' on TV, "Weeds" is new and refreshing, even if it is sometimes raunchy and over-the-top. Even this seems to add to the charm of "Weeds" and somehow seems appropriate for the series.

All in all, "Weeds" is a highly entertaining series with an excellent cast, great dialogue and addicting storyline. The first season of "Weeds" consists of only 10 episodes, and each episode is approximately 30 minutes in length (removing the credits, the run time of each episode is approximately 27 minutes). The first season leaves the viewer wanting for more, but then again, most popular TV shows end their first season like that. Watching "Desperate Housewives" I couldn't wait to see the second season, only to be disappointed. I will be eagerly awaiting the second season of "Weeds" arriving in my mailbox, hoping that it will live up to my expectations of a brilliant new show that was thought out in advance, unlike many other shows. Highly recommended.