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.