WEEDS
The Watcher column for the Canberra Times Tuesday 5 December 2006


If you don't like jokes about people getting stoned to watch the movie Passion of the Christ, saying "it's a straight up snuff movie", then Weeds (starting tonight in double episodes on the Nine/WIN network at 9 pm) isn't the series for you. Some people watching will keep up such a steady stream of "tut-tutts" they'll sound like a motorbike starting.

While billed as a comedy, Weeds has some very moving and dramatic moments. When Mary Louise Parker cries, I dare you not to. She's the star, previous winner of assorted Emmies and Golden Globe awards for fine work in the superlative Angels in America mini series, and as feminist lobbyist and sassy Josh-baiter in The West Wing.

As Nancy, the housewife stupefied by grief and selling cannabis to maintain her upper middle class lifestyle, Parker makes the whole cast of Desperate Housewives (except Felicity Huffman) look like they're in a school play.

Weeds is complex and subversive. You can't help warming to Nancy; she's recently been widowed, she's struggling to bring up two boys facing their own grief, and respectively according to age (10 and 15) also dealing with bullies and sexuality. But her detachment makes Nancy neglectful, she deals drugs at her kid's soccer match, and makes baked cannabis goods in the kitchen. Surely that's a kid-licks-the-wooden-spoon accident waiting to happen.

Nancy won't economise by sacking her housekeeper. And I'm pretty sure I noticed her having a martini afternoon tea. She's like a friend who you like, and care about, but who does stuff that makes you want to shake her - and not let your kids play at her house. Actually, the one thing that seems missing from the suburban dystopia of Weeds is female friends, and without exception the other moms are portrayed as gossipy, moronically Christian, bitchy, or...well, we'll get to Devil-Mom in a minute.

Mary Louise Parker herself has clashed with the series creator Jenji Kohan about her character being a bad mother. Parker even threw a script at her, Kohan told Entertainment Weekly magazine; ''I'm not sure we completely get each other, but we've learned to stay out of each other's way.'' Isn't that so much more refreshing than "The cast and crew were like one big happy family"?

A lot of the on-screen hate-heat is drawn by Elizabeth Perkins, revelling in the role of Devil-Mom, Celia. (Perkins was the woman who fell in love with the "grown up" Tom Hanks in the movie Big). Here, she's the diabolical parent association president, showing the flipside of the "obesity in our kids" debate by opposing school canteen drinks with sugar, while "diet" chemicals are okay, and taunting her own "fat" child for her "own good", replacing her chocolate stash with laxatives. Celia takes her husband's mistress out for a drink so she can call her ugly names, and impart her disappointment in her husband's unexpectedly less-than-stratospheric social and financial position, pointing out, "That makes me MRS Mid-level Asshole". She adds blankly, "I don't like dealing with things. I much prefer to pretend they didn't exist". She must have howled like a happy wolf when she got this part.

The men are all no-hoper dopers, too. (Nancy's slacker accountant is played by Kevin Nealon from Saturday Night Live.) The only visible black family supplies Nancy's product, and is forced to improve the quality as she wises up. Unlike the black characters in many US drama series (district attorneys, judges, wise spiritual characters) this mob has more pedestrian insights, "Like my momma always said, tough shit". The show isn't for the linguistically squeamish; Elizabeth Perkins drops the C-word before episode 3. Creator Kohan has said frankly, "We cross the line".

Weeds takes a whack at some heavy subjects: grief, race, teen sex, consumerism, broken hearts, bullies, uninvolved zombie parents, car envy, home help, and unavoidable relatives (Justin Kirk, another class act from Angels In America is the ultimate unwanted houseguest).

The real theme isn't drugs (so far, no examination of what they can do in terms of triggering depression or other mental illness), but what festers beneath surface respectability. The opening credits theme song 'Little Boxes' ("little boxes, made of ticky tacky, they all look the same") plays over scenes of identically dressed people jogging, and talking on cell phones while drinking chain store coffee. For obvious reasons (old novelty songs sung in odd voices wear out their welcome quickly), 'Little Boxes' drives people nuts, so by series two (they've made three), the theme is performed by various guest artists such as Elvis Costello, Death Cab for Cutie, Engelbert Humperdinck and folkies Kate and Anna McGarrigle.

After a stonkeringly heavy diet of "reality" TV it's again a relief to try a crunchy, fresh script. But it's infuriating that the Showtime cable channel, which makes the program, won't permit its Weeds website pages to be read from outside the US. Weeds.org.au will tell you all you never wanted to know about bridal creeper, alligator weed and serrated tussock, but that wasn't really what I was after.