PUFF PIECE

Weeds

Season premiere Aug 30 on Showcase.

"Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky-tacky /
Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes all the same" -- Malvina
Reynolds, "Little Boxes," 1962.

"No stress, no seeds, no stems, no sticks. Some of that real
sticky-icky-icky" -- Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, "Still Dre," 1999.

LOS ANGELES, CA -- The warehouse space is dark except for the rows of
grow lamps, though the potted pot plants don't seem to mind. Of
course, they're made of silk but every other detail of this faux-op
feels authentic -- from the Cannabis Culture posters to the
foil-covered walls and feed charts.

It's all part of a soundstage on Hollywood's Ren-Mar Studios lot,
where Lionsgate is filming season two of US premium cable network
Showtime's hydroponic TV hit Weeds, an incendiary suburban satire
growing through the cracks of the American Dream (and the Canadian one
for that matter -- the series airs here on Showcase, with season two
kicking off Aug. 30).

"The range of subjects you can touch upon in our society right now is
so vast and some of it is extremely taboo," opines Elizabeth Perkins,
Emmy-nominated for her supporting Weeds role as Celia Hodes, PTA czar,
cancer survivor and mean-ass mom. "We've got a lot of racial tension
in our country. We're at war. We have a corrupt government. So, yeah,
I mean, it goes deeper and deeper and deeper.

"There are a lot of people who are very opposed to [Bush's America],
so when you take a show that goes into that subversive realm, I think
the public embraces it because we have no voice."

Indeed, Weeds returns as Americans head down the rabbit hole of
mid-term elections with Orwellian buzzwords like "family values" and
"war on [insert adversary here]" mingling with flag-burning
amendments, border patrol "minutemen" and legislation targeting
videogames, gay marriage and, yes, television.

For those who've never watched or, perhaps, suffer short-term memory
loss -- last year's 10-episode season is out on DVD for about the
price of an 1/8th -- Weeds revolves around a simple, controversial
premise: widowed "soccer mom" Nancy Botwin, played with equal parts
brittle sadness and capitalist ambition by Golden Globe-winner
Mary-Louise Parker, earns a living dealing dope to her subdivision
neighbours, most notably a hilariously deadpan Kevin Nealon as Doug
Wilson, her accountant, city councillor and best customer.

Set in the imaginary SoCal suburb Agrestic, it's also a
no-holds-barred attack on "just add water" communities, from the
Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" theme song (which this season will be
covered each episode by different artists, including Elvis Costello,
Death Cab For Cutie and Jenny Lewis) to its familiar portrayal of the
'burbs as a soulless bastion of mediocrity, created by white flight
and with dark secrets hidden behind its green lawns.

"Our world is a little dimmer, a little dingier, a little darker. So I
think we offer a seedier perspective," says Parker of the infidelity,
drug abuse, alcoholism, eating disorders, plastic surgery and teen sex
going on behind closed gates.

Weeds was created by Jenji Kohan, a long-time sitcom vet who cut her
teeth on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air before moving on to Sex and the
City and Gilmore Girls. While brainstorming for a show of her own, she
settled on Proposition 215, the California voter initiative legalizing
medicinal marijuana.

"I was looking for a cultural taboo to pin a series on," she told
Entertainment Weekly earlier this summer. "Tony Soprano's a gangster
and a murderer. Vic Mackey on The Shield is a corrupt cop. I wanted a
female lead and I wanted her to create her own morality, so she needed
something to buck up against. Pot seemed perfect: it crosses every
demographic, age, political affiliation and religion."

With the culture wars raging, a family comedy about drugs was no easy
sell (HBO even passed on it). Yet, to Showtime's admitted chagrin,
Weeds has yet to engender much outrage: rightwing blogs and anti-drug
groups have been quiet; the only indignation the Bush administration
has mustered came when a drug policy official mocked a pot-scented ad
for Weeds new season premiere, which Showtime ran in Rolling Stone, as
"going for the over-50 demographic."

Perhaps the lack of controversy is the result of Weeds' slippery moral
ambiguities. After all, Nancy's housewife isn't actually all that
desperate. She could move to a less posh neighbourhood, lose the Range
Rover or her live-in Mexican maid. However, Nancy is essentially as
superficial as her upper middle-class neighbours.

"I like that she's not heroic," says Parker. "I like that she's
flawed. I think people find her more ingenuous than I find her. I'm
always going to look for the cracks because that's what I find more
interesting. You can't necessarily always find people appealing if
they don't have that. Otherwise, they're just boring, right?"

In fact, the show's rich subtext would be pointless without Parker's
complex performance, backup from the supporting cast and plotlines
that serve the story before scoring political points.

Over the first season, Nancy started taking pride in her profession
and taking ever bigger risks: turning her son's tutor into a campus
dealer, squashing a beef with a rival through alleyway sex. But her
most precarious move came at the season's end when she decided to cut
out her supplier from the 'hood, Heylia (Tonye Patano), by joining
forces with Heylia's nephew Conrad, an aspiring botanist and
slow-burning love interest played by standout Romany Malco (The
40-Year-Old Virgin).

Ironically, the biggest criticisms aimed at Weeds haven't been over
weed or even its anti-Iraq War subplot involving Nancy's
brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk), a ne'er-do-well army reservist.
They've instead centred on the portrayal of Nancy's suppliers as
stereotypically sassy, cornbread-cooking blacks from the inner city.

"I passed on the damn show [at first] because of scene two of the
first episode," Malco admits. "My agent's calling me, 'Are you crazy?'
I was like, 'I'm not feeling that.' It was like Good Times. But it was
like hooking up with a chick where everything's cool, but she's got
like a really weird sixth toe. You're not gonna drop her because of
the toe if everything else is gravy, y'know?"

Malco adds that Weeds' black characters became less cliched as the
season progressed: "That was like the really weird sixth toe and there
was an operation in the writers' room to remove it."

Last year's finale closed with the requisite cliffhanger: having
ascended to "Godmother" status, Nancy finally hooked up with a
prospective new boyfriend (Martin Donovan) only to sleepily discover
that he's a DEA agent.

"The second season begins exactly where the last season left off,
practically on the same frame," offers Parker. "My relationship with
Romany is going in a different direction and my eldest son, Silas, is
becoming more aware of what I'm doing and more enmeshed in that world."

The comedy may become rarer as the various households fall apart --
Reefer Sadness, anyone? -- but there'll still be guffaws as Andy
avoids Iraq by enrolling in Rabbinical school, Snoop Dogg stops by for
a cameo and Celia runs for Doug's council seat.

"Though at home I'm the alcoholic pill-popper, I'm bound and
determined to clean up Agrestic and make it a drug-free zone," Perkins
says with a laugh. "I'm sorta the voice of the American government
right now."

As ever, Weeds combines well-worn metaphors with complex characters to
shed light on the USA's pervasive hypocrisy, telling a stand-alone
story that doubles as real-world commentary. But there's one string
tying all its varied targets together, be it drug laws, oil wars,
institutional racism, suburban conformity or corporate greed.

"Dude, it's all economics," says Malco. "This is a green
country."

[sidebar]

Pot-ifications: Weeds on weed "They should absolutely legalize pot.
The amount of drug-related homicides would plummet; it would be good
for our economy; it would be safer, cleaner, healthier. People are
going to smoke it, period. You can't teach them, tell them, beg them
not to smoke it, so make it healthy." MARY-LOUISE PARKER

"It's a bad drug. I don't encourage it. But I went to see Deep Purple
once, and, of course, if you've been to any concerts it's in the air.
You can't help smoking it. It's really the cheaper way to do it. You
just kind of walk in and walk out stoned. By the way, it's usually
good pot." KEVIN NEALON

"This country hates marijuana and it's always going to be that way.
[But] we're trying to get rid of all the cigarettes. What about all
the cigarette factories? They're just missing this huge tax
opportunity. Why not just change the cigarette factories to marijuana
factories and everybody'll make a lot of money?" ELIZABETH PERKINS

"I used to grow my own shit. I did everything I could do without the
usage of advanced nutrients because I wasn't a big operation. We would
grow it in our backyard. I'd rotate the plants every day because they
lean toward the sunlight and I couldn't put them out in the open
'cause helicopters would go over the house all the time. I'm not a
paranoid person, but I would go buy these little plastic orange and
purple things and tie them to all the plants so they'd look like
flowers." ROMANY MALCO