'WEEDS' RIFFS ON LIFE IN BURBS

The stressed-out denizens of the suburban town in Showtime's new
comedy, Weeds, make the desperate housewives seem like contented cows
munching their cud.

The adorable Mary-Louise Parker stars as a new widow, Nancy Botwin,
with two messed-up sons, Silas and Shane, and no visible means of
support. So she makes a run at the drug trade, becoming pot dealer to
all the supposedly normal middle-classers who are hanging on for dear
life to their little shreds of the American Dream.

Weeds debuts at 11 tonight on Showtime, perpetual premium-channel
second banana to HBO. (The show moves to its regular time slot
tomorrow at 10 p.m.) The network repeatedly screams, "Look at me!"
with shows, such as Resurrection Boulevard, Queer as Folk, and Fat
Actress, that stretch boundaries of taste, subject matter or simply
expectation.

This comedy is in the same vein. The people in the made-up community
of Agrestic are outrageous, yet strangely recognizable. They're
skillfully played by actors who don't give the slightest hint that
anything is amiss, for instance, with a mother who arranges for a
nanny-cam hidden in a pink teddy bear to record the sexual excesses
of her 15-year-old daughter.

Or with a city councilman who is such a raging pothead that he tokes
up in his car, with the windows open, right there at the kids' soccer game.

Elizabeth Perkins is that mother, a horrible control freak whose
hobbies are boozing and gossiping. She wants to put her little grade
schooler, Isabelle, on thyroid medicine because she's pudgy. In the
meantime, Mom will replace the child's secret stash of chocolates
with Ex-Lax. She calls the girl "Isabelly."

Kevin Nealon, displaying the goofy semi-gusto - maybe you could call
it gust - he showed on Saturday Night Live, is the councilman, both
accountant to our entrepreneurial housewife and her biggest customer.

It's not easy being a suburban dope dealer. You have to compete with
the high school kid who formerly had the exclusive franchise. He's
named Jason, and he's a tough negotiator.

"I was at the orthodontist last week," he says, trying to get a good
deal on a few O.Z.'s from Nancy, "and I heard all about Shane's
overbite. That's going to cost you some serious green."

Nancy doesn't sell to kids, and she wants Jason to lay off, too. He
rightly calls her a hypocrite, which in Agrestic seems to be a
residency requirement. (Creator Jenji Kohan got the suburb's name
from her computer thesaurus. Apparently, it refers to farming, and
it's only a coincidence, she said, that it's an anagram for cigarets.)

About the only place where Nancy can find sanity is in the ghetto
kitchen of her connection, Heylia, a bulk dealer who bakes cornbread
while she cuts vast quantities of weed into one-ounce bags.

Nancy thinks one of the bags looks a little light.

"I can eyeball an ounce from outer space with my glasses cracked,"
Heylia retorts, and all her grown children in the family business
hoot with respect. It's no accident in Weeds that family love thrives
in the hardscrabble 'hood while it's in short supply amid Nancy's
emotionally arid, lushly landscaped enclave.

Weeds looks through cracked glasses beneath the neatly manicured
lawns, where it finds black humor, occasionally hilarious, in the
soul of the suburbs. Many Americans have already developed a taste
for desperation in TV comedy. Weeds will satisfy those looking for a
more intense satiric high.