Finding Weeds

Although I am still in House Post Partum, we took a stab at the Showtime series for which Mary Louise Parker won a Golden Globe this year in her role of Nancy Botwin. Weeds is dark chocolate dark - even in its very premise. A suburban wife with two sons who copes with widowhood and impending poverty by selling pot to the neighborhood. The show is different, decisive and disturbing. First, there's the drugs, of course. Then there's the sex. The issues of parenting in these difficult times are dealt with. Just two episodes in, am not quite sure how I feel about it, but I'm compelled to keep watching.

Because Parker is so lovely to watch. So much is expressed in the mere parting of her lips. And then there's the talented Elizabeth Perkins (Remember her from BIG and ABOUT LAST NIGHT?) as her controlling friend, desperately trying to make her pre-teen daughter lose weight, while equally desperately trying to keep her teenage daughter from having sex with her boyfriend, who just happens to be Nancy's son, Silas. "Promise me," Perkins begs Parker, "Promise me they will not have sex under your roof." Parker answers, "I promise, as a mother." The kids end up having sex in the Botwin's guest room, which has a skylight. The precocious teenage nymphet argues, "At least, we're not technically under your roof!" There's the pothead CPA played by SNL's Kevin Nealon who tells Botwin she must put up a legitimate "front" for her real business of drug dealing. Parker says, "Can my front business eventually be my real business?" Nealon says, "Nah, small business is f**ked." Oh...I almost forgot...Botwin's teenage partner, a drug dealing poet. When Botwin warns him, "No selling to little kids!", he retorts in verse: "No grass on their field, no grass will I yield." But when she chastises him for a ten-year-old in the nieghborhood getting busted, he says, "I promise you. The kid swore he was 37!"

This is a show I just know my mother would hate. This is a show my friends in the US with, the ones with kids, would blanch at and squirm uneasily. Disturbing is one word. But it is also delightful. When the overwhelmed, distraught Botwin breaks down in the arms of her pot supplier, you can' t help but cry with her. And when she deliberately trips her son's bully, you cheer for her.

It's not House. But I like it.