IN A NEW SERIES, THE SUBURBS LIGHT UP

IT doesn't take long for "Weeds," a gleefully transgressive new Showtime
series, to light a fire underneath the exhausted form of the half-hour
television comedy. In the opening scene of the pilot episode, we are
introduced to Nancy Botwin, a recently widowed soccer mom played by
Mary-Louise Parker, at a P.T.A. meeting. While she is arguing to have soda
machines banned from her children's school, her peer group of despairing
homemakers is quietly gossiping about the authenticity of her new designer
handbag and wondering how the suddenly single mother of two has been able
to maintain her standard of living.

Cut to Scene 2, where we find a more relaxed Nancy casually trading quips,
barbs and homespun wisdom with the people who make her feel most at home: a
family of drug dealers who supply her with the marijuana she sells to the
residents of her sleepy California suburb.

From the first strains of its theme song, the folksinger Malvina
Reynolds's anticonformity anthem "Little Boxes," "Weeds" (which has its
premiere on Aug. 7) clearly aspires to be much more than just a sitcom
about pot. Sure, there are throwaway jokes about getting the munchies and
the merits of smoking up before seeing "The Passion of the Christ," but
these are interspersed among darkly comic debates on subjects from race and
class relations to adultery to cancer to the ethics of dating the
handicapped. On "Weeds," pot is indeed a gateway drug, one that allows its
viewers into the lives of characters whose pursuits of all kinds of
personal freedoms inevitably lead to deeper levels of confinement.

When she first conceived of "Weeds," Jenji Kohan, the show's creator and
executive producer, was in need of an escape route of her own. At the start
of 2004, Ms. Kohan - a former writer for comedies like "Friends" and
"Tracey Takes On ...," and the daughter of Buz Kohan, a producer for "The
Carol Burnett Show" - had become disenchanted with her latest series, a
short-lived CBS family sitcom called "The Stones." When she wasn't battling
the network or her fellow producers - one of whom happened to be her
brother David, the co-creator of "Will & Grace" - she was watching lots and
lots of "The Shield" on FX.

"I loved how suave the characters were, and the nebulous morality," Ms.
Kohan recalled over a corned-beef sandwich at Canter's delicatessen in Los
Angeles. "I wanted to play in that arena, too. It was just a matter of
finding a subject." Taking note of the special place that marijuana use
occupied in the American consciousness, as a universal act of rebellion
that transcended ethnic and economic boundaries, Ms. Kohan realized she had
discovered her muse. "This was really the chance to write sophisticated,
dirty, fun stuff," she said, "about the kinds of characters I like to
watch: really flawed, complicated people."

It's hard to imagine a TV protagonist more flawed than Nancy, the
pot-pushing anti-heroine of "Weeds," a character so reprehensible that not
even the actress who portrays her will stick up for her. "She's kind of a
loser," Ms. Parker said "She's not virtuous, and she's not Robin Hood. She
just wants to keep her housekeeper, go to the nice grocery and keep buying
her $4 smoothies."

And yet, Nancy manages to elicit an audience's sympathy: she protects and
provides for her two sons, mourns for her husband and defends her turf from
less reputable dealers who see no harm in selling their wares to
schoolchildren. Her decision to trade in drugs is an unforgivable one, but
one that shows just how much she's willing to risk to keep her life and her
family in order. "Her intentions are good, and she's empowered because it's
something she's good at," Ms. Kohan said. "This is her ticket to
independence, so she doesn't end up the oldest Gap employee in America."

Nancy also benefits by comparison with the judgment-impaired company she
keeps, particularly her neighbor Celia, an icy, frustrated perfectionist
played with delectable contempt by Elizabeth Perkins, who openly refers to
her overweight daughter as "Isa-belly," and slips laxatives into her
child's hidden candy stash. "She has no relationship to pot," Ms. Perkins
said of her role. "She doesn't use it or sell it, but she may be the most
screwed-up character of them all. Somebody has to set the bar."

As a series whose comedic tone is more acerbic than rattlesnake venom,
"Weeds" sometimes struggled in its production process to find just how high
that bar could be set. "There are kids on the show," said Kevin Nealon, who
plays Nancy's stoner accountant, Doug, "and during our table reads for
certain scenes, they had to leave the room. For certain scenes, I had to
leave the room, too."

Ms. Parker said she had complained to the show's producers about dialogue
that she felt went too far over the line; she was particularly bothered by
a scene in which Mr. Nealon's character says that a local medicinal
marijuana clinic is better than Amsterdam "because you don't have to visit
the Anne Frank house and pretend to be all sad."

Ms. Perkins also had difficulty with a sequence in which Celia declares, in
private, that she wishes she'd aborted her daughter. "I went to Jenji," Ms.
Perkins recalled, "and I said, 'Am I coming off too mean?' And she said:
'Why? You're not saying it to her face.' And I thought: 'She's right. This
is her inner moment - this is how she really feels.' "

Though both of these offending items ultimately remained in the show, the
producers were willing to compromise with the actresses on other occasions.
"It's never our intention to sit here and say, 'Tee-hee, what can we get
away with?'" Ms. Kohan said. "We work through it."

Given her show's strong female leads Ms. Kohan acknowledged that "Weeds"
would inevitably draw comparisons to a certain runaway hit network program
about troubled women who live in a seemingly idyllic neighborhood. "I like
'Desperate Housewives,' " she said, "but I don't think those are modern
women. It's the 50's." Ms. Perkins agreed that there were crucial
differences between the women of "Weeds" and the women of "Desperate
Housewives": "They're fake," she said. "We're real women living in a fake
world."

The larger concern to Ms. Kohan is that "Weeds" will be misconstrued as
being pro-marijuana although it actually takes no stance on the drug one
way or the other. "I'm not comfortable saying we're here to endorse pot,"
she said. "If it became the show that's trying to convince people to smoke
pot, I think it defeats all the work we've done. But I absolutely don't
intend to vilify it, either. It's not about the evils of the demon weed."

Nor does Ms. Kohan want viewers to conclude that she is a pot smoker
herself. For one thing, she is nine months pregnant with her third child.
("I got knocked up and picked up at the same time," she joked.) And the
effects of marijuana, she said, simply don't agree with her temperament.
"It's not my drug. I'm too much of a control freak to enjoy it."