‘Weeds’ grows, but doesn’t go to pot

Mary-Louise Parker as Nancy Botwin in the Showtime series "Weeds."

Showtime’s “Weeds” is in the midst of its seventh and possibly final season and I’m wondering how we got here.

When the show started, the log line was: Widowed, pot-dealing mom in suburbia.

By the time the Botwin clan matriarch Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) bartered with a thug to smoke out the competition, she left the fictional town of Agrestic in charred ruins after a blaze at the end of the third season.

Now in its seventh year, the family has relocated to New York City. Nancy was welcomed home from a three-year stretch in federal penitentiary by her adult children.

Botwin is now a three-time widow, too.

It’s quite a leap from that log line to the present. Such a switch would be tantamount to “The Sopranos” moving the show from north Jersey to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

It’s easy to accuse the show of “jumping the shark,” a phrase invoked when something has changed or compromised to the point that it can never go back.

I’ve said that about the show during the past few seasons, yet I keep watching it.

That’s what happens with a lot of TV series.

As is true with any series that stays on for a number of years, we become invested in the people. We become more invested with television characters because we live with them for longer — hours and hours of episodes played out over the course of years. That’s far more investment than a movie, which is generally digested in a single, two-hour sitting.

Put simply, I want to see how things turn out for Nancy. I may have wanted to avert my eyes along the way, but I am curious to see her fate.

The show shifted from silly to serious during the gap between the third and fourth years, when creator Jenji Kohan and her writing staff were “sick of suburbia,” as she said in an interview last month.

There was a choice to be made: Languish in Agrestic and strain the reality of the show by having Nancy continually wriggle free of harm and evade the law or raise the stakes.

The writers chose the latter.

That had myriad consequences.

The comic relief — Doug (Kevin Nealon), Dean (Andy Milder) and Nancy’s brother-in-law, Andy (Justin Kirk) — spiraled into ridiculously juvenile scenarios. Andy showed a gasp at maturity during his infatuation with Audra (Alanis Morissette), but sunk right back to his familiar place as a sexless, de facto Clyde to Nancy’s Bonnie.

As a mother, Nancy hasn’t been a particularly good one, usually because she’s so mired in her own misdeeds that she doesn’t have time to consider those of her children. What began as a means to protect her lifestyle wound up completely destroying it for everyone close to her.

Nancy motivations were unclear during the fourth and fifth seasons when the family moved to Ren Mar, the fictional sea town near the Mexico border.

Her aims are a little more clear in the current season, although her direct return to mischief after a three-year stint behind bars left her saying only that she needed to “fail better” as a criminal.

The biggest sacrifice in trading the chuckles for drama was a sweetness and naivete about the perpetually iced-coffee-slurping Nancy. That attitude vanished as the consequences for her actions piled from possible imprisonment to death.

When the stakes changed for the Botwin clan, people have either tuned out — this season’s second episode showed a nearly 50 percent drop in viewers from the premiere — or remained interested.

Perhaps because of how much time we’ve spent with them already, I am in the latter group.

As the seventh season rolls toward what Kohan has said might be its final toke, I am stunned to find myself there, especially after how far away from the starting point we’ve gotten.

Maybe I’m too hung up on where we came in. In retrospect, “Weeds” just needed a better log line: A dramatic cautionary tale about what can go wrong for someone “dealing in the suburbs.”

Comments

[Sean D.]

I have finally allowed myself to read this as I just finished watching the current season the other day. You make some good points about the show but I knew from the beginning I would have to suspend my disbelief in order to enjoy the show. Some of the things that Nancy worked out of over the seasons were pretty preposterous, but they were enjoyable to watch nonetheless and that was the point. The show has become a caricature of what would happen if a widow started slinging pot because the reality of accidentally selling to an undercover cop in the second episode and the rest of the series playing out like 'Oz' isn't what they want. I understand it and I applaud the writers for their work. It's not easy doing that job, I'm sure.