So, anyway, I’m watching ‘Weeds‘.
The insta-review of every episode is best summed up by my wife: “She’s being stupid, and pissing me off.”
I like this show, in that it’s a 28-minute long Mary Louise Parker spank-bank download. I am so into her it’s probably criminal.
But the rest of the show befuddles me. It’s as if the writers were so impressed with the novelty of the premise, and the ongoing potential for ridiculous drama, they never bother to follow up on any of the genuine plot points. They churn through story elements and drop them like they’ve gone off their Adderal.
Consider: In the first 13 episodes (about 6 hours of television), we had no more than about 2 or 3 minutes of Nancy expressing any of the stages of grieving. He’s not been dead but for a few weeks or something, we never really establish it (that I was aware of) beyond vague allusion (the ceremony showing the headstone; do you know the lead time on one of those?). Yet she was able to establish her dope-dealing business in this short amount of time, enough to piss off the local dealer.
Working out the timeline is a prerequisite; and they play fast and loose with it ALL THE TIME. Consider season 2 features her marriage to the DEA agent, and we’ve seen them on screen together for about 5 minutes. Her snatch must be magic.
Other examples abound. 2 children are written out after the pilot, Celia’s older daughter and Doug’s son. One assumes they gay, dope-dealing kid was too much trouble and they got the deaf girl who provided more opportunity for “drama”.
Not a single person is likable. Doug and Dean are OK, I guess, but if you imagine them as real people you’d probably not want to spend too much time with them. And as my darling bride succinctly stated, Nancy is nice enough but she acts as if she knows it’ll all work out. She is aware she’s a character in a drama-edy and so never, ever makes any sort of concrete plan, trusting the writers to work it all out. It’s all very clever and novel and the writers are so very, very aware of this.
I don’t even know what role Celia has. She’s the nemesis, the suburban equivalent of a rival drug dealer, intended to provide comedic suburban drama to contrast the very dangerous world of drug dealing. They gave her a tiny, tiny character arc (being a nice person while thinking she’s going to die) but then got bored with it. Have her eternally be a cunt, it’s funnier!
The show just demands you not think about things. I know what my mortgage is: a modest 3 bedroom, 3 level townhome in suburban Loudoun County, bought about a year before the housing bottom, and 2 modest car payments. I made decent but not earth-shattering money; we could get by on my salary, but barely just.
In terms of chronology, she’s in a big-ass California McMansion with a housekeeper and 2 kids. Nancy pays her mortgage and bills by dealing weed to her neighbors. She’s pulling in at least $5k a month dealing dimebags to Doug and Dean? They’d have lung cancer by now.
And come on. I’ve bought weed before: if she was paying for her upper-middle-class lifestyle dealing weed to her suburban neighbors, you can bet your ass everyone would know she’s a pot dealer. Do you know why dealers all live in the ghetto? The Freakonomics guys essentially proved there’s no money in dealing.
I get that they didn’t want to do a hyper-gritty, SoCal version of ‘The Wire’ set in a suburb. I get that they’re doing an “adult” 28-minute sitcom. That doesn’t excuse sloppy writing or a case of ADD the size of SoCal itself.
It makes you wonder, are the writers high?