A KICK IN THE STEREOTYPE - A POT-DEALING SOCCER MOM

Showtime Takes A Gritty Look Inside Suburbia

Hypocrisy in the suburbs is hardly a new theme for television, but seldom
has it been explored with as much exuberance and intelligence as it is in
the new Showtime comedy series Weeds, starring Mary-Louise Parker as a
pot-dealing, single mom in the upscale community of Agrestic, Calif.

Weeds, which premieres tonight, is meant to shock - even by the standards
of premium cable - with a salty blend of four-letter words, graphic sex and
a soccer mom who sells marijuana at her 8-year-old son's games. But what's
more likely to make viewers uneasy is the way in which the series tramples
on the expectations and mores that frequently accompany middle-class
American life.

As Nancy Botwin (Parker) makes daily rounds between all-white PTA meetings
in Agrestic and drug buys from an African-American household in an urban
neighborhood, mainstream beliefs about race, class, community and morality
are unobtrusively, but undeniably, called into question. By deconstructing
conventional notions of family and motherhood and savaging contemporary
notions of success, Weeds joins (thematically, at least) ABC's Desperate
Housewives and HBO's The Sopranos in offering harsh critiques of the
American Dream, suburban style, circa 2005.

That's not to say that Weeds - a comedy built around the hot-potato topic
of marijuana and its use - will become a cultural touchstone like its
predecessors (or even a hit). Nonetheless, in its years of running a
distant second-best to HBO, Showtime hasn't offered a show that stretches
this high - and with such confidence.

The opening sequence, filled with images of contemporary suburban life and
set to a 1960s folk song, cleverly encourages comparisons between Agrestic
and the stultifying conformity of the Eisenhower era. As an overhead camera
focuses on manicured lawns, sun-splashed streets and red tile roofs, a
female voice sings Little Boxes, the 1961 Maliva Reynolds tune: "Little
boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky. Little boxes,
little boxes, little boxes all the same."

Viewers meet Botwin as she stands at the podium of an elementary-school PTA
meeting wearing a tense smile. As chair of the Healthy Children's
Committee, she urges that soft drinks be removed from school vending
machines and replaced with bottled water and naturally sweetened fruit juices.

Her fellow members are barely listening. They are gauging how Botwin is
handling the death of her husband, who dropped dead while jogging. One
concludes that she seems "pretty well fixed." Another says she was left
with nothing, adding: "I heard they spent it all on the new kitchen, which
looks fabulous."

A third wonders whether the youthful Botwin has had Botox treatments in
hopes of finding a new man to support her, and her two boys, and a live-in
housekeeper.

Cut from Stepfordian snipers to a kitchen table with three African-American
family members bagging marijuana and joking with Botwin as she holds out
her "knockoff" purse for inspection. This is a very different, relaxed
Botwin, and the smile looks genuine.

Botwin claims the purse is flawless, but Heylia James (Tony Patano), the
no-nonsense head of the family, instantly spots some bad stitching and
jokingly calls Botwin a "dumb, white [expletive]."

As her bags of pot are being weighed, Botwin kibitzes right back with a
sarcastic remark about "black people" stealing.

"White people steal," insists one of the baggers, Conrad Shepard (Romany
Malco). "Enron. WorldCom. They be stealing billions of dollars."

"Maybe black people need to start stealing bigger," Botwin counters before
rushing off to take her 8-year-old to a grief-counseling appointment.

Before the pilot episode ends, Botwin has sold an ounce of pot to a
high-school kid, who in turn sells to elementary-school children. She also
supplies marijuana to a city councilman (Kevin Nealon), and tries (not very
hard) to keep her 15-year-old from sleeping with his girlfriend. The
triumph of Parker's performance - just like that of James Gandolfini's
depiction of Tony Soprano - is that she makes one care about Botwin in
spite of all her flaws.

"I wanted to do a show that focused on the gray areas of human nature and
life, as opposed to the standard black-and-white, good guys/bad guys
stories that we see all the time on television," said Jenji Kohan, the
36-year-old creator of the series. "Since I was going to make her a drug
dealer, which is sort of a sinister title, I wanted this person to be
sympathetic and have a need to be doing this. So, I killed her husband, and
made her a widow with basically no skill set."

Parker, who won Emmy and Golden Globe awards for her performance in HBO's
Angels in America, doesn't defend Botwin: "There is no perfect relationship
or Garden of Eden or perfect anything. In our suburbia, there's a woman who
may seem perfect, but she's a drug dealer. If you would go into each of
these houses, you'd find some deep secret in every one of them."

The notion of unpleasant secrets lurking behind idyllic-looking facades of
suburban homes is not new, of course, to anyone who watched Desperate
Housewives last season - or for that matter, anyone who followed NBC's
Peyton Place 31 years ago.

But even in the deepest, darkest folds of the underbellies of Wisteria Lane
and Peyton Place, there were no moms secretly selling drugs even as they
publicly fought to save their children from sugar at the soft-drink machine.