The Po Show

Weedless

"Weeds" is done for the season, which means it's done for the next 9 months or so. That's a long time for me to live without my favorite show.

I'd vaguely heard about this show during its first season on Showtime. Then when the DVD of that first season came out during the summer, ads were plastered all over the place and I was amused by its concept: upper class suburban mom turns into pot seller. Plus it was golden southern California in the background, so I had to see it.

We rented the DVD (LOVE Redbox, which is in my grocery store and rents DVDs for $1 a night!) and I was totally blown away from the first episode. Loved the cast, loved the plot lines, loved the writing. We tore through the whole season in two nights.

And I wanted more! So I convinced Ross that we needed Showtime. Now understand, we have always been Basic Cable folks. Simple people who were too cheap to pay for the premium channels, who figured that we didn't need any more channels because we didn't have time to watch the regular channels anyway.

But this was beyond luxury. This was "Weeds," which was now considered (by me) a necessity of life. So we signed up for Showtime.

Yeah, the plotlines started getting a lot more far-fetched, sometimes to the point of annoying. But I was taken in by it all, and I wanted it to keep going. The last episode on Monday had a ridiculous, multi-plot line, cliffhanger. Bleah. I don't want to wait the length of time it takes to gestate a baby to find out what happens!

I have not been so into a show in many, many years. I actually don't think I've been this taken with a show, where I really CARED this much about a fricking TV show, since "thirtysomething." And that was a LONG time ago!

And I'm wondering why. Why this show? It does have the blend of melodrama/quirky humor that I love (being melodramatic and quirkily humorous myself). But what was the hook here?

I decided early on that it was the character of Nancy that somehow really got to me. Here she is, this pampered but feisty mom, about my age, who abruptly finds herself widowed with two kids and a big house in an upscale neighborhood on the hillside. What does she do? How can she support them? She finds an opportunity, selling pot to her wealthy stoner neighbors. She reconciles this to herself, that they are consenting adults, bastions of society, who just like to get high. She does not sell to kids, her buyers do not commit crimes to afford her product. Of course things snowball considerably as the show goes on, but that's where she starts from.

It's her mother's love that got me, I think, her absolute love for her boys, that made me love her character and the show in general. She walks a tightrope, lying to them about what she's doing, trying to shield them from the knowledge that their mom is a drug dealer. It hurts her, a lot, to do this. But she's trying to provide for them, in the way that she knows how.

And she's really lonely. She struggles with being a single parent. She's living a shadowy existence, trying to maintain her suburban mom image while leading this insane double life (which gets more insane as she teams up with her partner to grow the ultimate weed).

There was an episode in the first season that I keep thinking about. I was going to blog about it (like many, many, many topics, I blogged it in my head but never got around to actually putting it down on the screen); I was going to call the entry "Sex, love, and videotape." At the very end of the episode (during which her younger son has spent a lot of time surreptiously watching home videos of his dead father), Nancy is sitting alone in her bedroom, watching a video of her making love with her dead husband. She smiles, and she cries.

I thought about that act, watching images of your most intimate moments with the love of your life, who is now completely out of reach. The pain of it seems unbearable, but yet I understand the temptation to watch, to see him again, to see what you shared, to derive some measure of comfort in the midst of all your loneliness and emotional exhaustion.

I guess I love the show because I see myself in Nancy, and I hope to never be left in her situation. I don't want to be the one who has to stumble around and go on and find a way to maintain some semblance of normalcy for the kids. But I love watching Nancy struggle to do it, and I root for her.

"What do I tell people when they ask what you do?," her son asked her in the last episode (after she has finally admitted that she sells pot).

"Tell them I'm your mom," she answers, brushing the hair out of his eyes, tears welling a bit in her own. She tries to smile.

Exactly.