Weeds, about a cash-strapped LA mom who starts dealing drugs to maintain her lifestyle, is a rare TV high, writes Cathy Dillon.
Am I the only one addicted to Weeds? Maybe it's our current obsession with cocaine, but this pungent, blackly comic TV drama seems to have fallen below the radar on this side of the Atlantic, despite winning a plethora of Golden Globe and Emmy awards and nominations. But try it once - the third series has just started on Sky One on Sunday nights - and you might well get hooked. Forget the botoxed buffoons of Wisteria Lane. The discerning viewer's desperate housewife is Weeds' Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker), a long-limbed, berry-eyed soccer mom, who, when her husband suddenly dies of a heart attack, has to find a way to support her two sons. Nancy is a widow and her choice of weed is marijuana, which she begins dealing in order to keep herself and her boys in the luxury to which they are accustomed.
Though it's made for Showtime, Weeds displays the edgy excellence usually associated with HBO series such as Sex and the City, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. It was created by Jenji Kohan (whose first name, fortuitously, sounds pleasingly like "ganja"), who also worked on Sex and the City, and directed by Christopher Misiano, whose credits include The West Wing. Though its scripts are not quite as dazzling as those other series, a weekly hit of Weeds nonetheless gives an excellent TV buzz.
Nancy lives in the fictional, affluent LA suburb of Agrestic. She has the customary gigantic beige house, glossy Range Rover and collection of expensive spaghetti-strap tops. She has two boys, Silas (Hunter Parrish), a golden teenager, and pre-teen Shane, played by Alexander Gould, an impressive young actor with the same dark hair and huge black eyes as Parker. This is LA, so when she finds herself on her uppers, rather than selling the house-with-pool and letting the Latino maid go, Nancy starts dealing. Her suppliers are Heylia (Tonye Patano), a rotund, middle-aged black woman, and her handsome nephew Conrad (Romany Malco), who rapidly develops a thing for Nancy.
At the beginning, the former homemaker, who is white and rich and therefore pretty clueless, thinks this is a bit of a breeze. She resolves to try and keep it decent, refuses to deal to high-school kids or to handle anything stronger than grass, and manages to prevent her kids from finding out where their allowances are coming from. But gradually, amusingly, things spiral out of control.
Nancy develops a friendship with her monstrous neighbour Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins), and begins dating a hunky man, Peter (Martin Donovan), but he turns out to be a cop - and in the drug squad. She falls foul of a local Armenian gang, who resent the interloper on their turf. And she becomes increasingly drawn into the gangland drug culture - in last week's episode she was an unwilling participant in a drive-by shooting and had to pick Shane up from summer school with gangsta blood and bullet cartridges all over the back seat.
In addition to having responsibility for her boys, Nancy is also saddled with her brother-in-law, Andy (a brilliant Justin Kirk), a fantastically sleazy, free-loading ne'er-do-well, who goes to rabbi school - and sleeps with his tutor - to get out of serving in Iraq. Andy is such a compelling lech you want to applaud when the Armenian's guard-dog chews off two of his toes, but you also want to re-run his hilarious monologue of masturbation instructions to Shane (it's on YouTube.)
One of the satisfying aspects of the show is that it provides such meaty roles for Parker and Perkins. Parker is a veteran of independent film, who never quite made the Hollywood A-list, having worked with such directors as Jane Campion (Portrait of a Lady) and Anthony Minghella (Mr Wonderful) . Up to this, the equally accomplished Perkins was best known for starring opposite Tom Hanks in Big.
Increasingly it's TV drama that is supplying the best roles for America's middle-aged "character" actors (anyone who doesn't look like Brad or Angelina or Josh or Scarlett). Sex and the City did the same for Sarah Jessica Parker, while Six Feet Under had Lili Taylor and Patricia Clarkson. And it's not just the women - Martin Donovan is a veteran of Hal Hartley's early films and Matthew Modine is here too, as an oily developer.
The show's cleverness is well represented by its opening sequence, a montage of scenes of sun-dappled suburbia - slim women jogging in shorts, white-shirted businessmen surging out of the local coffee franchise with their lattes - overlaid with Little Boxes, Malvina Reynolds's 1962 jaunty critique of the 'burbs, sung by a different artist each week. So far these have included Randy Newman, Regina Spektor, Elvis Costello, Death Cab for Cutie, Joan Baez, and Billy Bob Thornton. At the finale of each season it's the turn of Reynolds's own, simple, endearingly croaky version.
The show paints with a wide satirical brush. Gangstas, the Christian right, the Nation of Islam, council bigwigs and big business are all lampooned. No one in Agrestic has any scruples. But, for all its liberal cred, it's high on style and low on real politics. Fundamentalists of all stripes probably consider it Satan's work, but it's unlikely to scare anyone in power. Its aim is to entertain. As a result there are those who complain it is merely a smart-assed ratings chaser, with no moral centre to its satire. It does sometimes feel as though the producers are courting the sensation-seekers' vote. One episode in which members of a rival gang discussed raping Nancy gave some critics the fear, and I almost turned off for good after an episode in which Andy brought 11-year-old Shane to a prostitute to "get rid of" his virginity. But I couldn't go cold turkey. With its crackling dialogue and a lead actress who manages to keep her character on the right side of likeable - just - Weeds gives a rare small-screen high.
Weeds is on Sky One on Sunday nights at 10pm