SOME WORDS ABOUT 'WEEDS'

Societal Quandary Sprouts On Showtime

The way Jenji Kohan tells it, she created "Weeds" because she was tired of
working in black-and-white TV.

Widow Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) starts a grass service to make ends
meet in Showtime's "Weeds."

This may seem like a peculiar thing for a woman in her mid-30s to say. But
Kohan, whose writing and producing credits include "Gilmore Girls," "Will &
Grace" and "Mad About You," isn't talking about the Eisenhower era.

"I was looking for a subject where I could explore (life's) gray areas,"
something she'd been unable to do in network comedies, Kohan told TV
critics earlier this year at a Los Angeles gathering to promote her
half-hour comedy for premium cable's Showtime channel.

"And the other thing was this notion in psychology called 'postconventional
morality,' where if you're not operating within the confines of society's
morals, you have to develop your own moral code. I was searching for a kind
of vehicle for that.

"There had been a lot of magazine articles about the drug dealer next door,
and pot just seemed like a good entree into the whole thing. And after that
the pilot just sort of flowed out."

What flowed was the tale of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker, "The West
Wing"), a mother of two whose upper-middle-class life in fictitious
Agrestic, Calif., is shaken by a domestic earthquake: the sudden death of
her husband, the family's sole wage earner.

When the ground stops trembling, Nancy decides that, to keep gas in the
Range Rover and soccer uniforms on her kids' backs, she'll have to go into
business for herself.

Lacking job skills but a pragmatic sort of person, she decides to deal in a
commodity in short supply and great demand in her suburban community:
marijuana.

One of her best customers is Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon, "Saturday Night
Live"), an easygoing, cheerfully cynical city councilman who's also Nancy's
accountant. Another is Dean Hodes (Andy Milder), whose wife, Celia
(Elizabeth Perkins, "Must Love Dogs"), is the president of the P.T.A. and,
in the eyes of many, Agrestic's perfect mom.

Needless to say, this perfection goes about as deep as the lacquer on
Celia's nails.

"There's always a reason why somebody becomes so closed off and so
insular," Perkins said of her 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."

Parker was intrigued by Nancy's do-it-yourself moral code.

In an early episode, for example, the character reluctantly sells pot to
Doug's teenage son - but only on the condition that he not resell it to
younger kids.

"I just liked the world that (Kohan) created," Parker said. "I thought it
was unapologetically dark and the morality of it was skewed from the
beginning, so you can't necessarily make judgments on the characters.

"A lot of times on TV, (a character) is the same person at the top of the
show as they are at the end. It doesn't leave you asking anything. You sort
of feel like you know it already."

Kohan is well aware that some people will have only one question about the
show: How dare she make a drug dealer a sympathetic character, a widowed
mom who's nicer to Celia's children than Celia is?

But that's just the point, in the writer's mind: It's worth asking whether
Nancy's business enterprise is really so heinous.

"I like pot as a subject because it seems to be kind of the mild end of
this whole drug debate," Kohan said, adding that the dispute over the
medical use of marijuana added a contemporary political charge.

She went on: "Personally, it's not my drug. I don't really enjoy it. But I
did a lot of research, and as a political issue, I'm perfectly comfortable
saying I believe that it should probably be legalized, regulated and taxed."

Given her subject matter, Kohan - who has written for two HBO series, "Sex
and the City" and "Tracey Takes On . . . " - said she didn't even try
pitching "Weeds" to any of the broadcast networks.

Her experience last year creating and producing a conventional sitcom -
CBS' now-you-see-it, now-you-don't "The Stones" - was not a happy one.

In Kohan's view, "the networks really operate within this culture of fear.
They have advertisers to answer to. They need a hit."

"They are very dependent on the past. You know, 'This worked, so it should
work again.'

"Showtime just said, 'Go,' and it was the greatest thing they could have
said to me."

Kohan was looking for a change of style as well as subject.

Like most cable comedies, "Weeds" has no laugh track, and she doesn't miss it.

"It's a struggle to have to come up with a certain number of jokes per
page," she says of some of the comedies in her past.

"The sitcom form is very specific. It limits you to have to 'button' every
scene, (to have) your actor in a certain place (on the stage)."

Of course, Kohan realizes that her desperate housewife - a soccer mom who
gets her kicks in ways not addressed in the family Christmas letter - will
be compared to the famous ones on the No. 1 broadcast network, ABC.

"We shot (the pilot) before 'Desperate Housewives' aired," she said in
response to a question.

"It definitely dovetails with a lot of themes from 'Desperate Housewives,'
but I think it's a different situation. They were two different animals
that were just kind of co-existing at the same time."

After tonight's 10 o'clock premiere, Showtime will air each episode of
"Weeds" twice each night on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9 and 9:30 p.m.