Television:

SHOWTIME'S 'WEEDS' LOOKS AT MIDDLE-CLASS DYSFUNCTION

Don't Expect Another 'Desperate Housewives'

Fifteen minutes into the the first episode of Showtime's pungent
comedy "Weeds," viewers may be wondering if they're high (10 tonight,
Channel 17, Grand Forks cable).

The series is set in the fictional suburb of Agrestic, Calif., an
upper-middle-class community that looks a lot like Calabasas or
Stevenson's Ranch, where it is shot. West Hills is its neighbor.

In Agrestic, recently widowed and desperate housewife Nancy Botwin
(Mary-Louise Parker) deals pot in sandwich bags to her toxic,
self-absorbed neighbors in order to support her two sons and keep up
her own cushy lifestyle.

If Nancy's moral choices seem selfish, she's hardly out of place in
Agrestic. Listen to one of her customers, her accountant Doug (Kevin
Neelon), gleefully extol a medical marijuana facility he recently
visited. It's better than Amsterdam, he enthuses, "because you don't
have to visit the Anne Frank house and pretend to be all sad."

Funny, but ... the characters on "Weeds" make the Wisteria Lane crew
look like they're living in a "Leave It to Beaver" world.

"Weeds" creator Jenji Kohan, a veteran writer of network comedies and
an Emmy award winner for "Tracey Takes On," says she was looking for
a vehicle to "float some very flawed characters."

"Pot seemed to be in the air, in the news, and it seemed like a
natural," Kohan says. "I thought of a female sort of anti-hero who
did something risky, but not too offensive. She couldn't be a coke dealer."

Sensing no network would touch it, Kohan took the project straight to
cable where, to her delight, Showtime bit right away, and with no reservation.

"It seemed like exactly the right thing for us," says Robert
Greenblatt, Showtime president of entertainment. "It was something
that was inherently dangerous and edgy, and we had to approach it in
the right way, but we never shied away from it."

Pot as a metaphor

And while marijuana is the hook, it's really a way for the dark
satire to dig into dysfunctional suburbia, where adults are addicted
to their SUVs, lattes and insecurities while their children see their
parents' hypocrisies but are speeding toward their own empty adulthoods.

A native Angeleno who lives in Los Feliz, Calif., Kohan recalls an
incident as a teenager when, while raiding the fridge at a friend's
house, she discovered bags of pot in the vegetable crisper. The
memory served as fodder for "Weeds."

"It's not like every other mom is dealing drugs, but it's not an
unfamiliar concept," she says. "And I don't think this is the most
original idea in the world. But TV has never dealt with drugs head
on, or at least in a neutral position. We don't vilify. We present
them as is, and I'm really proud to have remained neutral."

"When you get to know the show," adds co-star Elizabeth Perkins, who
plays Nancy's friend Celia, "the marijuana to me is really used more
as a metaphor for the sort of underbelly of this perfect world that
all these people are trying to live in. So, I don't see it as some
other people might interpret it, as titillation."

Parker says she likes the world that Kohan created.

"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."

Perkins' hardened Celia is unaware of her friend's dealings, lost
instead in her frustrated expectations, her husband's infidelity with
a tennis instructor who found an inventive way to use her racket; her
15-year-old daughter Quin's randy sex life ("I've teased him enough,"
she says about Nancy's son when asking if they can have sex in
Nancy's house); and the fact that her younger daughter, who she calls
"Isa-belly," overeats. The PTA leader hardly has endeared herself to
her family with tricks like substituting chocolate laxatives for
Isabelle's candy stash, resulting in an embarrassing episode for the
poor girl at school.

"My character is more politically incorrect in her extreme attempts
to be politically correct," says Perkins. "She's sort of in charge of
the moral fortitude of the school and yet is probably the most
(expletive)-up of everybody."

But Perkins adds that she really loves playing the character "because
she is the uptight PTA mother, and I can then go in and find the
layers that are underneath that. I mean, there's always a reason why
somebody becomes so closed off and so insular and so in a dome. 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."

Cracks in characters

There are a lot of cracks in all the characters in "Weeds."

"It's really interesting to me," says Parker, "because a lot of times
on TV, the person is the same person at the top of the show as they
are at the end ... . It doesn't leave you asking anything. You know
what I mean? You sort of feel like you know it already."

That's not the case with "Weeds," which, as Greenblatt puts it, can
be really amusing and "then it can really punch you in the stomach."

Kohan says she's amused by the comparisons to "Desperate Housewives,"
but it was just coincidental. "When we were shooting our pilot, they
hadn't come out yet. I think the town's big enough for both of us.
We're different enough. We're cable, and we have a drug element."

But "Weeds" doesn't have the frothy soap-opera kitsch of "Housewives"
to lure viewers. It's got an edge. In fact, it's got a real kick. And
even for an adult-themed show with a late time slot (9 p.m. Monday,
Wednesday and Friday), Kohan acknowledges the series won't be an easy
sell to audiences.

"There's a certain level of discomfort, but hopefully, we cut it with
humor and with reality. It's a very realistic show," she says. "And I
think people will either say, 'Oh my gosh, that's me,' or, 'Oh my
gosh, that's someone I know.'"