DEALING HOUSEWIVES.(weeds)(Television Program Review)

"Weeds," a new Showtime comedy series in which a suburban widow takes up the not very noble profession of pot-dealing after her husband drops dead, can't be called courageous, since the premium-cable networks have little to lose when they venture into controversial territory, but it is nonetheless daring. "Weeds" actually meets the rarely fulfilled promise of Showtime's former slogan: "No Limits." Showtime suffers from reflexive, and mostly substantive, comparisons with HBO, but "Weeds" puts it a little closer to HBO in its asymptotic relationship with the Tiffany network of the premium-cable universe. (If, that is, such an old-school title can be applied to a channel that, in addition to "The Sopranos" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," offers the uncultured pearls "Cathouse" and "Real Sex." Of course, the Tiffany network itself, CBS, was the one that sold us such gems as "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres." So enough of that.) "Weeds" brings to mind a number of TV shows--"Desperate Housewives" among them--as well as the movie "E.T." Like that movie, "Weeds" is set in a soulless development that has been thrown up amid the beautiful and still stubbornly wild California hills (you can encroach on the hills, but they--their coyotes, snakes, and mountain lions--will encroach right back), and the family it revolves around consists of a single mother with children of tender years.

Until the death of her husband, Judah, who had a heart attack while he was out jogging, Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) led a regular upper-middle-class life in a community called Agrestic, an unpretty, and misleading, word that means "rural." (The name is a cleverly sidelong way for the show to establish its attitude toward the suburbs--the implication being that the number of these drywalled dead zones has now outstripped the supply of nice misnomers for them, such as Sylvan Hills and Sparkling Pond Farms.) In some ways, Nancy still is leading a regular life: in the show's opening scene, she attends a school meeting and tries to persuade the other mothers there to push for the replacement of soda with bottled water and juice in the school's vending machines. TV shows almost invariably portray school meetings as a no man's land, with women whispering gossip to one another or becoming absurdly adamant about a minor matter affecting their own precious child. "Weeds" is no exception; this is how the show tells us both that there are dirty secrets in these California closets and that it has satirical credibility. Like most shows, "Weeds" doesn't win any points for subtlety in this area, or in some others, including its soundtrack, which underlines every moment with all too obvious knowingness. The show's theme song is the insufferably smug sixties folk ditty "Little Boxes," by the protest singer Malvina Reynolds, an indictment of suburban conformity that you need to hear only once in your life, for historical purposes. It doesn't feel good to be talked down to at the beginning of every episode of a show.

Luckily, "Weeds," which was created by Jenji Kohan, who also wrote almost half the episodes (her first name sounds almost like a slang term for marijuana), is better than its theme song. And dramatically it does take us into some unexpected places. In that opening scene, Nancy, instead of breaking down upon realizing that she's the subject of gossip, or cracking under the strain of new widowhood, holds her own against the chattering asses and against Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), another mother who has a strong opinion on the soda question. Nancy does break down toward the end of the first episode, but the timing of the scene is a surprise and the moment is brief. This character is less trembly and vulnerable than the ones Parker often plays, and the change suits her. She isn't just doing a turn on a stereotype in this role; she's showing us a real, idiosyncratic person.

Nancy's coolness extends to lying to her children, fifteen-year-old Silas (Hunter Parrish) and his tween brother, Shane (Alexander Gould). When she is paged at an odd hour and has to leave the house, Shane asks where she's going, and she says, "It's a Neighborhood Watch thing." Waiting for her in her ...