Jenji Kohan built a show about a widow who sells marijuana to keep her kids in a house with a pool, and Showtime ran it for eight seasons and 102 episodes. Weeds premiered on August 7, 2005, and ended on September 16, 2012. It is a comedy, a crime story and a drama at once, and it is very good at two of those three things most of the time.
Trailer, via ManiacFamilyThe.
Nancy Botwin Starts Selling in Agrestic
Mary-Louise Parker plays Nancy Price Botwin, a housewife from Southern California who turns to dealing after her husband Judah, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, dies. She has two boys, Silas and Shane, played by Hunter Parrish and Alexander Gould. The first three seasons sit mainly in Agrestic, a fictional town in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.
The premise is small and the show knows it. Nancy is not a kingpin in season one. She is a mother with a mortgage and no plan, and the gap between those two facts is where the comedy lives.
Kohan created the series and serves as showrunner and executive producer under her Tilted Productions label. When Weeds debuted, it earned Showtime’s highest ratings. That is worth holding on to, because the show that started as a suburban satire is not the show that finished.
The Botwins Move, and Keep Moving
The geography is the spine of the series, and it shifts under the family’s feet. Seasons four and five put the Botwins in Ren Mar, a fictional San Diego suburb. Season six sends them to Seattle, Washington and Dearborn, Michigan. Season seven keeps them in Manhattan for the full season, then moves them to Connecticut in the finale and through season eight.
Each relocation costs the show something. Agrestic gave Weeds its best running joke: the gap between how the Botwins look and what they do. Once the family is on the run, the satire thins out and the plot takes over.
- Agrestic, San Fernando Valley: seasons one through three
- Ren Mar, San Diego suburb: seasons four and five
- Seattle, Washington and Dearborn, Michigan: season six
- Manhattan: season seven
- Connecticut: season seven finale and season eight
Andy, Doug and the People Around Nancy
Justin Kirk plays Andy Botwin, Nancy’s brother-in-law, who shares her house for most of the run. He arrives in Agrestic as a fun-loving slacker, and Nancy treats him as a burden. He becomes the main father figure in the household anyway. Her sons adore him, and the show suggests they see him as their last link to Judah.
Andy falls for Nancy in season four and works out that she does not feel it back. She manages the relationship to keep him in the family. Between those two jobs, he studies to be a rabbi in Hebrew school, deals marijuana and sells bicycles.
Kevin Nealon plays Doug Wilson, described as a foolish accountant. Elizabeth Perkins plays Celia Hodes, a narcissistic neighbor with a husband, Andy Milder, and a daughter, Allie Grant. Nancy’s wholesalers are Heylia James, played by Tonye Patano, and Conrad Shepard, played by Romany Malco. Jennifer Jason Leigh appears as Jill Price-Grey. Ethan Kent and Gavin Kent both play Stevie Ray Botwin.
Nancy Marries Three Times
Nancy’s marriages are the show’s clearest measure of how far it travels. She has a quiet wedding with Peter Scottson, a DEA agent played by Martin Donovan, who is later killed. In season five she marries Esteban Reyes, played by Demián Bichir, the fictional mayor of Tijuana and a cartel leader. He is murdered by the seventh season.
In prison she starts a long relationship with Zoya, played by Olga Sosnovska, a woman convicted of killing her own boyfriend. The series finale jumps forward seven years and shows that Nancy marries Rabbi David Bloom, played by David Julian Hirsh, who later dies in a car accident.
Her dealing career has mixed success, and she ends up near the top of an international drug-smuggling cartel. Over the run, the Botwin family becomes more and more tangled in illegal activity. That sentence is the whole arc, and it is also the problem: the show keeps escalating because it does not know how to stop.
What Weeds Gets Right
The early seasons are the ones worth defending. Nancy’s first deals are small, local and funny, and the show lets the danger sit next to the domestic detail instead of replacing it. Parker plays the role without asking for sympathy, which is the correct call. Nancy is not a good person, and the show does not pretend otherwise.
Kirk is the other reason the middle seasons hold. Andy is the character most aware of what the family has become, and his unreturned feelings for Nancy give the comedy a floor to stand on. Nealon and Perkins fill out Agrestic with the kind of neighbors who make a subdivision feel like a trap.
The writing keeps its nerve about money. Nancy sells because the family needs the income, and the show never lets the audience forget the bill.
Where the Series Slips
The moves cost more than they give. Ren Mar, Seattle, Dearborn, Manhattan and Connecticut are backdrops, not communities, and Weeds needs a community to be funny. Once the Botwins are fugitives, the show leans on plot: cartels, prison, the mayor of Tijuana. The stakes rise and the comedy drops.
The later marriages are the clearest symptom. Peter, Esteban and Rabbi David Bloom each arrive as a plot turn rather than a person, and the show treats Nancy’s relationships as escalation rather than character. Zoya is the most interesting of them and gets the least room.
Eight seasons is a long time to keep a premise this thin in the air. The show’s best version is three seasons of a woman selling weed in a town that would rather not know.
The Numbers
- Premiere: August 7, 2005
- Finale: September 16, 2012
- Seasons: 8
- Episodes: 102
- Network: Showtime
- Metacritic: 78/100
- Our score: 7.8 of 10
What Holds Up in 102 Episodes
Weeds earns its 7.8. The first three seasons in Agrestic are sharp, specific and willing to be ugly about money, and Parker and Kirk carry them. The back half trades the show’s real subject, a suburb lying to itself, for a chase across five states and a cartel plot that never lands as hard as a single scene of Nancy counting cash at her kitchen table.
Here is what matters. The show’s reputation rests on the premise, and the premise is the part that holds up. The later seasons are the part people remember less, and that is fair. A series that ran 102 episodes and got its best work done in the first third is not a failure. It is a show that found its voice early and then spent five years outrunning it.
Watch the Agrestic years. Watch Andy realize what he is to this family and stay anyway. When the Botwins leave the Valley, Weeds keeps going, and it keeps being watchable, but it stops being about anything you can name. 7.8 of 10.
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