Pubdate: Sun, 07 Aug 2005
Source: Plain Dealer, The (OH)
Copyright: 2005 The Plain Dealer
Contact:  http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/342
Note: priority given to local letter writers
Author: Mark Dawidziak
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)

SOMETHING SMELLS FUNNY ON CABLE

Showtime executives are incredibly high on "Weeds," as dopey as the premise 
for this controversial comedy may sound. Mary-Louise Parker stars in the 
satirical series about a struggling soccer-mom widow who makes ends meet by 
selling marijuana to a quirky circle of suburbanites.

"Weeds" premieres at 11 tonight, moving into its regular time slot at 10 
p.m. Monday. The series is half of a joint effort to push Showtime into a 
leadership position in the comedy field.

The other half of the pay-cable channel's operation-comedy, a series 
version of the "Barbershop" films, debuts at 10 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 14.

"I look at 'Weeds' and 'Barbershop' as aggressive moves into comedy series 
programming, which has been a goal of mine since day one," Showtime's 
entertainment president, Robert Greenblatt, told TV critics last month in 
Los Angeles.

He wasn't just blowing smoke. Showtime is putting a tremendous promotional 
push behind "Weeds," hoping it doesn't quickly go to seed. In addition to 
Parker, the cast features Elizabeth Perkins and former "Saturday Night 
Live" regular Kevin Nealon.

"There weren't too many scripts around, and this one fell into my hands and 
it was just amazing," Nealon said during his Los Angeles meeting with 
critics. "I loved it because it was edgy and it was different and it took 
chances."

The chances to which he refers are being taken by the show's Emmy-winning 
creator, writer-producer Jenji Kohan. Her credits include "Mad About You," 
"Will & Grace," "Sex and the City" and "Gilmore Girls," but it was a rocky 
experience as the executive producer of "The Stones," a short-lived 2004 
CBS series, that drove her to Showtime.

"Basically, I was coming off a CBS series that had not gone so well, and I 
was just kind of going for it," Kohan said. "And what I was really looking 
for was a subject where I could explore two things I was getting obsessed with.

"One was gray areas . . . and the other thing was this notion in psychology 
called post-conventional morality, where if you're not operating within the 
confines of society's morals, you have to develop your own moral code. And 
what I was searching for was kind of a vehicle for that."

She found it in Agrestic, a fictional California town. The Stepfordlike 
slice of suburbia is a land of perfectly manicured lawns, but that's not 
the type of grass at the dark heart of "Weeds."

A wicked take on the insecurities behind a seemingly normal American 
neighborhood? Let's just say Kohan is the type of writer who enjoys 
stirring the pot.

"Coming out of 12 years of network television, to have the kind of freedom 
and the lack of scrutiny over every issue has been fantastic," Kohan said. 
"It was a dream."

Parker stars as the recently widowed Nancy Botwin, saddled with debt and 
the responsibility of caring for two sons. She discovers that selling pot 
behind closed doors is considerably more lucrative than selling pots and 
pans door-to-door.

Nancy is the cul-de-sac's Queen of Cannabis. She's the Doyenne of Dime 
Bags. She's the connection. And she's a mom trying to keep house and home 
going for two troubled boys, Silas (Hunter Parrish) and Shane (Alexander 
Gould).

Rolling from "The Stones" to the stoned, Kohan purposely tried to make 
Nancy as sympathetic as possible while giving her one of the most 
sinister-sounding occupations, drug dealer.

It's a morally ambiguous world that Nancy inhabits. One of her closest 
friends, uptight PTA president Celia Hodes (Perkins), also is a potential 
nemesis. Celia is Agrestic's self-appointed chief of the morality police.

"There's always a reason somebody becomes so closed off and so insular and 
so in a dome," Perkins said of her "Weeds" character. "I happen to think 
she's just holding it all together because, underneath it, there's a lot of 
chaos and a lot of cracks in the plaster."

Another close friend, city councilman Doug Wilson (Nealon), also is one of 
her best customers. Doug makes the suggestion that Nancy start a bakery as 
a cover business to launder her drug money.

Nancy is painfully aware of the moral conflicts and contradictions. She 
doesn't use pot and only sells to adults, but, in tonight's opener, one of 
Nancy's customers calls her a hypocrite for selling to the parents of minors.

Escaping from suburbia, Nancy feels more comfortable at the happy Los 
Angeles home of her suppliers, Heylia James (Tonye Patano), Conrad Shepard 
(Romany Malco) and Vaneeta (Indigo).

"I did live in a kind of bland suburban community when I was in junior high 
school in Arizona," Parker said. "I guess it would be something akin to 
this world . . . It was some place I wanted to get out of, actually. Yeah, 
I kind of hated it."

But she loves the place crafted for her by Kohan.

"I just liked the world that she created," Parker said. "I just thought it 
was kind of unapologetically dark, and the morality of it was skewed from 
the beginning, so you can't necessarily make judgments on the characters.

"You don't exactly know who a person is in the beginning. You think you do, 
which is really interesting to me, because, a lot of times on TV, the 
person is the same person at the top of the show as he or she is at the 
end, and it doesn't really leave you anything. You sort of feel like you 
know it already."

That sort of predictability is what fueled Kohan's growing dissatisfaction 
with the broadcast networks.

"Showtime just said go, and it was the greatest thing they could have said 
to me," she told TV critics gathered for their semiannual press tour. "They 
were not afraid of anything I presented. And it's dark and it's edgy, and I 
had carte blanche for that."

Still, she's braced for the backlash from those uncomfortable with the idea 
of a comedy about a pot-dealing mother. Yet Kohan settled on marijuana 
precisely because it is a controversial topic in national discourse, 
although she says, it "isn't going to trigger people like coke or gay 
marriage or, you know, all these other hot buttons."

"I like pot as a subject matter because it just seems be kind of the mild 
end of the this whole drug-war debate," Kohan said. "I chose it as a 
subject because it was sort of politically charged."

Greenblatt has given her enough rope. His hope is that Kohan is giving him 
the straight dope.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom