Dopey in Suburbia
In Weeds, satire goes too easily to pot
Nancy Botwin is a soul sister to those desperate housewives of Wisteria Lane. Suddenly widowed, Nancy is strapped for cash as she raises two sons — a horny teen and a moody 8-year-old — amid the gossipy hypocrisies of a sunny California cul-de-sac.
Her solution: peddle marijuana, first in Baggies and later in baked goods, to the community's soccer moms and dads. In the town of Agrestic, PTA might very well stand for Pot Tokers of America.
As a satire of a not-so-secretly debauched culture of porn, pot and pubescence, Weeds (premiering Sunday, Aug. 7 at 11 pm/ET) is both coy and obvious, deriving a bit too much self-pleasure in its supposedly shocking subversiveness. It's not truly funny or outrageous enough to qualify as comedy, and the doses of drama (including a major character's revelation of cancer) are often heavy-handed.
Thankfully, Mary-Louise Parker is a near-perfect Nancy, alternately amused and horrified by her predicament, masking her underlying panic with a sardonic, wide-eyed winsomeness. She can see through her neighbors, including Elizabeth Perkins as the haughtiest of monstrous mommies, and she feels more at home with the rambunctious black family from whom she buys her drugs.
Things pick up in the fourth episode, when Nancy's wastrel brother-in-law (Justin Kirk) arrives to further disrupt her already unsettled life. "There's not enough pot in the world to get these people stoned enough to forget where they live," he says, a little too smugly.
He may be right, but the only thing Weeds gave me the munchies for was new episodes of the far superior Desperate Housewives.
http://www.tvguide.com/tv/roush/review