No wonder you housewives are so desperate lately – I never realized your days are so full of dramadey! (Note: please do not attempt to use this word in Scrabble matches.) If you aren’t picking up the kids from school, you’re convincing the tuck-shop lady that the reefer in the youngest kid’s lunch-box is Oregano; if you’re not coaching Little League practice and Tee Ball, you’re giving a hot-shot to the Phys-Ed teacher for giving Junior a D minus in Dodgeball; and you love your hubby to bits, but he still hasn’t fixed the leaky roof tile where you’re growing hydroponic opium poppies in the ceiling, though you asked him last week! Anyway, I still have to organize the church fete (and remember to keep the LSD out of the candy-floss sugar this time) and take little Sally to the dentist (even though I could totally score her some Novocain at half what they charge), so you all get comfortable on the couch and help yourself to some brownies (no, not the ones on the blue plate, you’ll still be coming down at Xmas!), while we all tune in, turn on and drop out with this week’s featured show, WEEDS (Mondays, Nine – 10:30pm).
WEEDS follows the busy suburban life of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker of FRIED GREEN TOMATOES), who is trying to juggle housework, a husband and her two school-age boys – figuratively, not literally – although that’s an idea for an act on SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE! Nancy is nice but square, only relaxing via PTA meetings and her two loves, gardening and cooking. She dreams of someday opening her own bakery. The Stepford Wife behaviour comes to an abrupt halt when her husband (Jeffrey Dean Morgan of SUPERNATURAL, who seems to be carving out a career of playing fathers who turn up, deliver a few lines of dialogue and then die) succeeds in pushing his cardio rate to zero while jogging one morning. Nancy is left with her two teenaged boys, the mortgage and a whole load of bills apart from the ones on her plastic lawn flamingos. Her solution is to combine her passions for gardening and baking, and no, she doesn’t start producing her own kiln-fired garden gnomes, she makes ends meet by growing and selling Marijuana (and harder stuff) from her home!
Nancy’s trade of PTA for THC sounds funny, and yes it is, but the humour can be very dark as the show doesn’t shy away from showing the consequences of drug abuse. Nancy is at constant risk of trading her hot-house for the big-house and makes some very shady business partners, and several people in Nancy’s Fakery (the bakery she uses as a front to distribute her happy cakes) have already been sent to sleep with the knishes.
Joining Parker in this tale of white picket fences and white powder are Elizabeth Perkins (BIG) as Cynthia, Nancy’s too-perky-to-be-true friend and president of the PTA, who is none too nice to her overweight lesbian daughter Quinn; Justin Kirk (ANGELS IN AMERICA), as Nancy’s late husband’s free-loading Rabbi brother; Mary-Kate Olsen (amazingly, they managed to separate her from her twin Ashley) as a fundamentalist religious whacko interested in one of Nancy’s teenaged sons; Carrie Fisher as a divorce attorney from Alderaan… I’m sorry, I meant Arkansas… and Martin Donovan (THE OPPOSITE OF SEX) as a crooked federal agent who wants his own slice of Nancy’s pie on a whole lot of increasingly disturbing levels.
Bake yourself something nice and fire up the show!
