Weeds

“You cannot become a lesbian just because you don’t want to lose weight!” Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins), Nancy’s closest friend, announces to her daughter when she catches her kissing another girl. Unlike Nancy, Celia is the kind of mother who thinks that she knows exactly what’s going on in kids’ heads. To her, there’s a right and a wrong way to do everything, and most of the people around her are getting it all wrong. Despite her controlling parenting, Celia maintained the pleasant demeanor befitting an Agrestic housewife until a breast cancer diagnosis during the first season sent her spiraling out of control. Suddenly awakened to the stultifying conformity of her surroundings, Celia became prone to wildly inappropriate outbursts, from flashing her breasts in front of Nancy’s teenage son to having an extramarital affair with Nancy’s business partner Conrad (Romany Malco).

This season, Celia has set her sights on running for City Council against Nancy’s stoner accountant and other business partner, Doug (Kevin Nealon), and she won’t let anyone talk her out of it. She’s also determined to get Nancy to open up to her, but when Nancy remains tight-lipped, Celia pulls her hair and screeches, “Be my friend! Be my friend!” Such reactionary antics might seem like empty high jinks on another comedy, but thanks to the smart dialogue and Perkins’ fine acting, there’s a melancholy, almost regretful flavor to Celia’s boldest stunts and most outrageous statements. In the midst of the nastiest or most bizarre explosion, we get a palpable sense of the years Celia lost to following the path of least resistance.

Then there’s Nancy’s brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk), a major-league slacker and recreational stoner whose utter lack of concern for the opinions of others allows him to traipse happily through the most restrictive environments, enviably heedless of negative outcomes. When he’s not pulling some scam or poisoning his nephews’ little minds, Andy regularly gets high and rambles on incoherently with Doug. In one scene from the first season, Doug and Andy, in grandest stoner style, wonder out loud over whether their rat-infested pot might carry “the plague” (Doug eventually decides that “fire kills plague” so the two are safe to smoke up.) In another scene, while passing the bong back and forth in Nancy’s living room, the two men get into a heated debate over what “taint” is. Finally Doug asks the housekeeper, “Lupita, what do you call the thing between the dick and the asshole?” Her answer? “The coffee table.”

Along with stoner antics, Andy brings a dimension to family life that’s rarely seen in conventional comedies. A few episodes into the second season, Nancy encourages Andy to have a frank sex talk with her preteen son, Shane (Alexander Gould). Instead of struggling to spit out the right words, Andy delivers a carefree monologue on the pros and cons of various methods of masturbation. His routine is ridiculous and slightly twisted, but he leaves Shane thrilled and ready to experiment instead of, say, embarrassed and mortified.

This is what “Weeds” does best: It takes the nastiest bits of domestic life and turns them upside down, showing us the lives we might lead if we chose to loosen up, ignore the naysayers and follow our most genuine urges. Even when Andy takes Shane to see a hooker or Nancy shows up late for dinner and then washes down two aspirin with a beer instead of eating, it offers a little emancipation from conventional expectations of what’s “normal.” This is where “Desperate Housewives” seemed to be headed early in its first season, before it got waylaid by the empty plot twists needed to satisfy the expectations of the prime-time soap.

“Weeds” roams free of such expectations. Instead of melodrama and murders, we get a believably mundane snapshot of a life spinning out of control. Surrounded by careers and lives as finely tuned and perfectly timed as high-end sprinkler systems, Nancy fumbles through her life, half in shock, perpetually nursing the dregs of a triple Frappuccino, her face a messy jumble of questions. On a typical day, Nancy might pick up a massive bag of pot from her dealer, spend the night with her lover, then absentmindedly drift into her own house in the morning, ashamed at the chaos she’s left behind. We’re witnessing an irresponsible mom who’s coming apart at the seams, sure, but we’re also seeing an (albeit extreme) alternative to following the strict rules of what makes a good parent. As scattered as Nancy can be, it’s not clear that she’s any worse off than the judgmental, controlling parents around her. After her teenage son, Silas (Hunter Parrish), gets into a tussle with his girlfriend’s father, who blurts out that the kid is a “fucking loser” and that Nancy is a “shitty parent,” you can see the rage light up Nancy’s eyes right before she shoves the guy and threatens to kill him if he touches her son again. Nancy is a wreck, but she’s still the mom you’d want on your side: Preoccupied and inconsistent, yes, but also true to herself, honest and fiercely loyal.

This show rests on such a strong premise that it could’ve easily devolved into predictably goofy stories and fluffy little twists in its second season. Instead, the writers held themselves to higher standards, as if they were writing a thoughtful, character-driven drama rather than a half-hour comedy. Even when Nancy’s boyfriend, who we found out was a DEA agent at the end of last season, goes to some extreme and unfathomable lengths to keep her in his life, the whole thing feels oddly touching instead of totally implausible, because both characters are fully realized and feel like real people. In fact, five episodes into the second season, I found myself wishing that “Weeds” were an hourlong drama, just so there’d be more of it to savor.

Of course, the second season still offers a healthy dose of over-the-top, farcical situations: Doug seems likely to win his City Council seat without having a single idea beyond making sure the other council members bring good snacks, since, as he tells one guy, “vegetarian pigs in the blanket are bullshit“; Celia’s husband, Dean, has a meltdown in the lobby of his law firm after being fired, and ends up getting “tasered” by one of the partners; and Andy tries to wriggle his way into rabbinical school just to avoid getting sent to Iraq. But there are also enough thoughtful, realistic stories to make Nancy’s friends and family feel like the slightly odd neighbors next door — the sorts of neighbors you really wish lived next door, at least when they’re not flushing socks down the toilet or yelling at each other or being threatened by the local drug lords.

Like many writers before them, the creative team behind “Weeds” clearly takes pleasure in twisting the straight lines of suburban life into tangled knots, and there’s a good reason for that: The contrast between what constitutes proper family life in America and the chaotic mess that most of us make instead is enough to keep us locked in a struggle to keep up, to fit someone else’s restrictive image of the lives we’re supposed to be leading. As confused and preoccupied as they are, Nancy and her tribe remind us that no matter how much pruning and trimming we do to keep ourselves neat and appropriate, some genuine, impetuous self is sure to rear its ugly head, like a leggy stalk of milkweed in the middle of a begonia patch.

While our TV shows paint us all as easily distracted, neurotic, spoiled, grumpy human beings, we chuckle along as if we’re above it. “Ah yes, a dark comedy — a warped, overly cynical take on life!” we say, then blow off even more work to troll the Internet for something shallow or despicable or depraved to distract us from our lazy, irritable, vainglorious selves.

Drugs, not hugs

“Quiet and mean, those are my people. I don’t do chatty.” — Nurse Jackie

Imagine if Carmela Soprano woke up this morning, got herself a gun, and blew Tony Soprano’s head off. Then, picture Carmela selling her McMansion, cutting up her credit cards, cutting her hair short, throwing out her make-up, and moving to Manhattan to take a job as a kick-ass vigilante nurse, happy to break the rules whenever it means helping ordinary, everyday people to make it through a hard time.

But in this age of darkness, we can’t very well stop there, now, can we? Next, we give Carmela a nasty addiction to pain pills, a self-involved doctor friend who takes her out to expensive sushi lunches, a pharmacist lover who slips her free Vicodin, and a sweet husband and two little daughters waiting at home, unaware of Mommy’s secret life.

“That doesn’t sound like Carmela at all!” you say? Exactly. Welcome to Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” (premieres 10:30 p.m. Monday, June a new half-hour dramedy that’s more drama than comedy, showcasing Edie Falco’s numerous charms outside of the realm of suburban Mafia angst. Jackie Peyton is a (mostly) good egg with a sharp tongue who doesn’t do chatty but who’s willing to go to any length to alleviate her patients’ suffering.

“Doctors don’t heal, they diagnose. We heal,” Jackie tells newbie nurse Zoey (Merritt Wever), but doesn’t fully explain her policy of healing her patients by any means necessary, whether it translates to protecting them from uncaring hospital administrators, stealing drugs for them, allowing their children into the E.R., respecting their requests to decline treatment or putting a cocky but negligent doctor in his place.

When she’s not preventing the system from crushing the sick and uninsured, Jackie is crushing Percocet into her morning coffee. She may have started taking the pills to treat chronic back pain she developed from being on her feet all day, but now it’s clear that Jackie is hooked. Against the backdrop of an incredibly difficult, hectic, largely thankless job, it’s obvious what the pills give her: an ability to beat back the darkness and cope with whatever unpredictable, messy challenges get wheeled into her E.R. next.

Jackie navigates her world with a dissatisfied smirk plastered on her face, like she’s steeling herself in anticipation of the next blow. Every now and then, though, her eyes grow wide with empathy, and we see how much she cares. Once the moment passes, Jackie returns quickly to the picture of no-nonsense efficiency, instructing rookie nurse Zoey not to be so cheery and not to say hi so many times a day, or informing her that only idiots and magicians say “Ta da!” In another actress’s hands, this would constitute an implausible tightrope walk, but Falco lends Jackie grit, compassion and an unapologetic, frank flavor of selfishness. This is the toughest sort of character to play, an impossible knot of contradictions, at once funny, kind-hearted, dismissive and slightly nihilistic. It’s easy to see why Falco chose this role.

The colorful range of characters around Jackie are equally entertaining, from her close doctor friend Eleanor O’Hara (Eve Best), who’s more concerned with pricey lunches and expensive clothes than her patients (albeit in an likeably edgy, British Catherine Keener sort of way) to Mohammed De La Cruz (Haaz Sleiman), a fellow nurse who alternates between supporting Jackie and giving her a hard time. Their cynicism is counterbalanced by the dorky, tiptoeing cheer of Zoey, whose irritating interruptions often serve as a somewhat naive but necessary voice of reason among the world-weary longtime denizens of the E.R.

But even with such a jaded and narcissistic circle of friends, Jackie’s affair with Eddie the pharmacist (Paul Schulze, who also played Edie Falco’s priest love-interest on “The Sopranos”) is tough to parse. Maybe Jackie started sleeping with Eddie to get more pain pills once her legitimate prescription wore out, but now she genuinely loves him — or at least she seems to in the first episode. Obviously an affair is within the realm of possibility, even for a morally upright person like Jackie. But once you meet her handsome, adoring husband Kevin (Dominic Fumusa) and her two young daughters, the whole picture gets a little confusing. Yes, it would’ve been a cop-out to make either her husband or Eddie unlikeable. But to present a stridently self-righteous, smart, reasonable woman who’s sleeping with two really great guys? That not feasible to me, even with loads of pain pills and an unbelievably stressful job in the mix. Jackie is shocked when Dr. Cooper, a young physician new to the job, grabs her breast and tells her it’s a “Tourette’s response to stress,” but her own response to stress is even more fantastical than his.

 Unfortunately, the affair doesn’t make any more sense by the show’s sixth episode than it did by the end of the first. How does someone like Jackie end up constructing a double life for herself? Yes, it’s easy enough to say that this is a side effect of addiction, that it comes with the territory. But after watching half a season of this show, there should be more hints to Jackie’s problems in the mix, beyond the pills. We can see that Eddie may have a more refined, intellectual side than Kevin (who’s a bartender) does. But as long as you’re working with a dark comedy, why not give one or both of the men some obvious flaws, instead of presenting them both as lovable, great guys? There’s something slightly disingenuous about this picture.

TV darkness can take many forms, and after years of watching unnervingly optimistic tripe, it’s more than welcome. But sometimes darkness is used to hide the flaws in a concept that doesn’t completely hold together. Under the cover of darkness, “Nurse Jackie” veers into wild and woolly territory without clarifying its characters’ motivations or its central premise.

Naturally we’re willing to forgive these flaws at first; there are more than enough snappy insults and bad attitudes around to keep us happy for a while. But several threads of the story are picked up and dropped again without warning. Jackie is annoyed when Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli) strikes up a friendship with Eddie, but it’s not quite clear why. Jackie looks likely to get into trouble with her boss, Gloria Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith), but any real consequences are obviously being saved for the last few episodes of the season.

We do get a glimpse of Jackie’s concern for her family when her older daughter, Grace, starts staying up late obsessing about the bubonic plague. Her teacher calls Jackie and Kevin into a conference to tell them Grace has been drawing drab pictures with no sun in them. Jackie is defensive at first, but later asks, “Who draws Florida with no sun? It’s the goddamn sunshine state!” Instead of agreeing to treat Grace, Jackie draws a bright yellow sun on her picture, demonstrating her attempts to will her problems out of existence. Unfortunately, though, that subplot disappears almost entirely for two episodes, so that we pretty much forget about it.

Obviously if “Nurse Jackie” were more of a comedy and less of a drama, it might not feel like a problem. It’s not as if we demand to understand the motivations and inner workings of Jack Donaghy of “30 Rock” or Michael Scott of “The Office.” But a dramedy faces the unfortunate challenge of having to walk a line between believability and farce. If you really want your show to be character-driven — and there’s no doubt that’s the aim here — you have to make sure the characters make some logical sense. Even if they behave illogically, it should all fit together, however sloppily, into some form the audience can connect with.

Showtime is a sucker for half-hour dramedies with an appealingly modern, smart tone: “United States of Tara,” “Weeds,” even the relatively disappointing “Californication” appeared stylish and fun at first. But clever quips and absurd, edgy plots that lead nowhere are getting harder and harder to rally around. As the first season of “Tara” drew to a close, something about Tara’s (Toni Collette) self-consciously casual-cool demeanor started to make her feel far less authentic than her relatively whimsical, absurd alternate personalities. Similarly, “Weeds,” which begins its fifth season the same night “Nurse Jackie” premieres, constantly threatens to spiral into such darkness that it’ll never find its way out again. While Doug and Andy and the boys always have their high times to cut the tension, this season a pregnant Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) finds herself trapped in a severely twisted relationship with a menacing Mexican drug lord who, through gritted teeth, threatens her into seeing a Spanish-speaking gynecologist of his choosing. Ha. ha. Hysterical.

The point is, unlike the family sitcom or the procedural drama, the half-hour dramedy genre is relatively young, and that shows in its wobbly plot lines, unsteady character development and unfocused premises. For all of its charms, “Nurse Jackie” needs to offer a little more than an enigmatic nurse and a parade of clever grouches. Sometimes rather than seeking out thoughtful ways to address and resolve the questions and problems they presented at the start of the season, TV writers today hide behind witty quips, lovably flawed characters and the chaos of a morally unsteady universe. In other words, they do what we do: When confronted by complexity, they hide behind insults. It works for a while, but then some larger guiding principle has to come into play. Even to the most pessimistic among us, the darkness gets a little old if there’s no sense of order or redemption to balance it out. When will TV pull out of its current nose dive into the inky abyss and find some new flavor of sweetness and light to believe in? Would it kill them to draw a shiny, yellow sun into the picture for a change?

Each year, we nurture hopes that summertime will provide a respite from the impossible expectations of modern life. Even if we have very few vacation plans and tend to work just as hard during the summer, we still stubbornly imagine ourselves with sun-streaked hair, breezing around in linen pants, reading great novels while sipping on icy, fresh lemonade poured from a nearby pitcher. There are no dirty rugs or sulking dogs or neglected babies in our summer fantasies. But the truth is that most of us spend our summers the way we spend the rest of the year: watching “Weeds” and “Project Runway” and “So You Think You Can Dance” while the baby rocks in her automatic swing, patiently awaiting the birth of self-awareness and its accompanying pervasive sense of failure.

The living is queasy

Aw, come on! Darkness and pessimism can be invigorating, fun, even! You just have to lean into the horribly oppressive alienation of our sad little lives in this impoverished modern era, then you’ll catch the spirit. Catch that spirit, everybody!

Just look at “Nurse Jackie” (premieres 10:30 p.m. Monday June 8 on Showtime), an unremittingly dark half-hour comedy with a premise I haven’t figured out yet (but which I’m contractually obligated to figure out by next week). Jackie (Edie Falco) is a very effective and efficient nurse with a handsome husband and two adorable daughters. She also has a serious pill problem, a lover who doesn’t know she’s married, and an unnervingly cynical, hopelessly bleak worldview. Jackie demonstrates very clearly that there’s real joy to be found in darkness. She also demonstrates just how irresponsible and wrong the modern urge to put yourself first can be. Jackie is the sort of flawed heroine who’s made for a world in which self-involved doctors consume sushi lunches while their patients suffer, and bad mothers stick their babies in automatic swings with the soothing “cricket” sounds turned on so loud that their toddler daughters ask, “Where are the crickets?”

At any rate, “Nurse Jackie” is my new favorite show of the summer, so don’t miss it. It comes on right after my old favorite show of the summer, “Weeds,” which returns for a fifth season next week (premieres at 10 p.m. Monday, June 8, on Showtime). Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) — see also: the most selfish mommy in the known universe — is back and worse than ever. She’s pregnant with a Mexican drug lord’s baby and her kids are starting to hate her outright. If she keeps it up, she’ll end up like Celia Hoades (Elizabeth Perkins), who’s been kidnapped by her own (abusive, bitter) daughter, Quinn, only no one cares about her enough to pay the ransom. Congratulations to Showtime, for boldly going where no cable network has gone before in bringing us the Selfish Mom Hour. Selfish moms everywhere salute you!

Yes, I recognize that just because you’re a mom and you’re selfish, that doesn’t mean that you’re plucky and cute and people should care what you have to say. Instead, think of the Selfish Mom as an archetype, one that serves as a conduit for all of our self-flagellating and thwarted expectations in these trying, alienated times. Having been flooded with too much information on the “right” way to do everything under the sun, we all find ourselves falling short of the mark, over and over again, each day. This must be why shows like Bravo’s “Project Runway” (premieres Aug. 20) and “Top Chef Masters” (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, June 10) exist — so we can feel a cathartic purging of self-hatred as we watch professionals flailing their way through impossible challenges and, time and again, failing miserably. They become wildly unprofessional, cursing and sweating and lashing out defensively. Reduced to a jumble of nerves, they begin repeating self-hating mantras for the camera: I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, and people don’t like me! Meanwhile, at home, we feel oddly calm and relaxed for the first time all day.

Since Bravo’s “Project Runway” replacement, “The Fashion Show” (10 p.m. Thursdays), hasn’t been nearly as lively or as compelling as the genuine article, you have to wonder if the spinoff “Top Chef Masters,” which features world-renowned chefs instead of newbies, will have the same charms as the original. At least the producers are the same, and no one will be asked to incorporate silky gray harem pants in five different “looks.” (Aren’t the challenges on “The Fashion Show” awful? This is the worst copy of a good show since the achingly bad Bravo experiment “Step It Up and Dance.”)

Gaylords of the dance

Speaking of dance shows, “So You Think You Can Dance” (currently airing on Fox, check listings) is back this summer (and again in the fall), and while the audition phase is less than compelling, this is one of my all-time summer favorites. Controversy has already plagued (or blessed?) this season of the show, thanks to some dismissive comments judge Nigel Lythgoe made about a pair of male auditioners who ballroom danced their way across the stage together. Lithgoe said that he couldn’t really get into watching two men ballroom dancing. No big surprise there, really: Lythgoe is hopelessly stodgy and closed-minded for a 50-year-old. He also doesn’t like punk rock hairstyles or ripped clothes or self-congratulatory gestures onstage, and he often urges particularly fey dancers to dance in a more manly fashion. If you’re in a forgiving mood, all of the above could be excused as aesthetic preferences, however mired in sociocultural prejudices they might be.

Nonetheless, after outrage was expressed by GLAAD, Lythgoe apologized profusely for his comments, thereby cementing the growing impossibility of being an outspoken asshole in public. Now, is that what we really want, people? Do we really want a world devoid of outspoken assholes? PTA meetings will lose their spark, reality TV will go dark. Who will we jeer at over our pudding cups each night?

Unfortunately, this probably means that “So You Think You Can Dance” will soon lose its delectably dorky, unself-conscious tone (particularly since it’s set to air in a fall prime-time spot on Fox). Yes, Lythgoe and fellow judge Mary Murphy alternate between an open-minded embrace of any heartfelt artistic expression (to the point of shrieking and weeping openly) and a prickly conservative stance that feels horribly out of touch with the times. But that peculiar friction constitutes one of the primary delights of watching this show. What will the horny old choreographer and the ballroom nut job think of this hip-hop routine? Will they throw their hands to the heavens and praise the Lord for such purity of motion, or will they make some unsubtle comments about a dancer’s costume that clearly indicate that Mary thinks she looks too butch, but Nigel wants to do her? This is the Simon Cowell Factor: Their lustful gazes and petty grievances and unfair assessments make us love our favorite dancers all the more feverishly.

At any rate, just know that this show is seriously addictive (if you’re in the market for a new addiction, and who isn’t?). For a more enlightened yet less aesthetically rigorous offering, you might sample the hip-hoppier-than-thou MTV version, “America’s Best Dance Crew” (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6) with its break-dancing, stunt-sporting, signal-flashing teens. Despite the ne’er-do-well “looks” they sport, Shane Sparks and the other judges recognize that these are good kids, kids who know how to work hard, kids who almost uniformly found meaning in their lives by moving their bodies to the sweet strains of “Let Me See That Booty” and the like. “America’s Best Dance Crew” is sort of the scrappy, younger, ghetto cousin to the ballroom dancing and preteen-girl-focused cheese of “So You Think You Can Dance,” but together they make a complete meal for former dance team geeks, “Solid Gold” fans and general-purpose dance-loving freak jobs nationwide.

Post-dramatic stress syndrome

But we’ve only scratched the tippity top of the glacier of new and returning shows sliding your way this summer. Don’t forget everyone’s favorite freelance spy dramedy “Burn Notice” (9 p.m. Thursday June 4, on USA), which returns with its usual, faintly cheesy, speedy finale resolution. After dropping out of the bad guys’ helicopter into the ocean and swimming ashore, Michael is up to more trouble within minutes, thanks to a hairy assignment from an old friend.

Afterward you can check out “Royal Pains” (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, June 4, on USA), a new drama about a doctor, Hank, who loses his job and ends up becoming an on-call physician for high society clients in the Hamptons. Now, most USA shows are a little cheesy on the surface, but this one is also filled with cheese, the kind of cheese that frat boys eat late at night when they’re drunk. Like a cross between a dumb version of “House,” a smart version of “90210″ and a modern version of “MacGyver,” “Royal Pains” features lots of hot girls in bikinis, macho emergency doctor maneuvers with plastic baggies and duct tape, and jokes with the word “dude” in them. Hank actually says to his brother, “Do me a favor? Never speak to me again” – and it’s supposed to be funny. Like some of the CW’s less captivating offerings, this show is a cheese pizza with cheese-stuffed crust. But if that sounds tasty, by all means, enjoy!

Do we have “House” or “Grey’s Anatomy” to blame for the fact that medical dramas seem to be making a major comeback? In TNT’s “Hawthorne” (9 p.m. June 16), Jada Pinkett Smith plays a nurse, while Fox’s “Mental” (9 p.m. Tuesdays) is about an unconventional doctor in a psychiatric ward and “The Listener” (premieres 10 p.m. on Thursday, June 4, on NBC) centers around “a 25-year-old paramedic who has a big secret — he’s a telepath.” How original they all sound! Wake me up when it’s over.

AMC’s “Mad Men” isn’t back until August, so let’s distract ourselves with more new shows, none of which sound all that good. “The Philanthropist” (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, June 24, on NBC) stars James Purefoy (Mark Antony from “Rome”) as a rich Romeo who becomes a changed man, and “Merlin” (8 p.m. Sunday, June 21, on NBC) is a 13-episode update of the story of the infamous sorcerer in the city of Camelot, “in a time before history began.” Wow, when did history begin, anyway? When jalapeno poppers were invented?

But don’t get so distracted by magic that you forget about the second season of “True Blood” (9 p.m. Sunday, June 14, on HBO), in which we rejoin Sookie, Bill and the rest of the gang for more atypical vampires and stereotypical rednecks. And if Sookie’s Southern belle feels a little aimless, there’s always the focused, ever-hungry, vaguely neurotic energy of Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) of “The Closer” (returns 9 p.m. Monday, June 8, on TNT).

For those with a thirst for military-themed entertainments, it might be time to peruse the much loved domestic drama “Army Wives” (third season premieres 10 p.m Sunday, June 7, on Lifetime) or the much ignored mystical drama “Kings” (8 p.m. Saturday, June 13-July 25) — which has been canceled, sadly, but NBC is burning off the second half of the season on (cough, cough) Saturdays. I may be all alone, but oh yes, I’ll be watching.

Beyond the fail

Oh sweet Lord, what else, what else? “Entourage” is back in July and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is back in August and this fake cooking show called “Food Party” (premieres 11:15 p.m., June 9, on IFC) is supposed to be funny, plus HBO has some show about a well-endowed young man, aptly titled “Hung” (premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, June 28) (although at first I assumed the guy from “Top Chef” got his own spinoff). It’s all so confusing, there’s just too much TV out there, like that goofy Sci Fi show “Eureka” (9 p.m. Friday, July 10, on Sci Fi) or everyone’s new favorite adventure-job reality show, “Whale Wars” (9 p.m. Friday, June 5, on Animal Planet) or a million other things. I know I’ve failed you by not listing every single show, but for the love of Don Draper, remember, summer is for sipping lemonade and feeling smug about your linen pants! Now go get some stupid linen pants and stop thinking about TV already. 

Of course, having an affair with a sexy Mexican politician/drug kingpin while your teenage son screws an older divorcee (and sells pot out of her cheese shop) and your younger son aims to please an unsavory pair of oversexed rebel preteens does tend to lead to a familial apocalypse. But you wouldn’t really know that, the way Nancy has drifted around her new seaside home of Ren Mar in a caffeinated daze, doing whatever her thug bosses demanded, including looking the other way when hard drugs, weapons and young girls (presumably being sold into sex slavery) started coming through the tunnel from Mexico that led into Nancy’s maternity shop. It took a hallucinogenic wake-up call for Nancy to locate a conscience and inform DEA agent Captain Till about the whole ugly operation.

As much as I’ve enjoyed the much-needed change of venue and the unpredictable twists and turns of this season, there were admittedly fewer scenes that could make you laugh out loud than there were during the early seasons of “Weeds.” When you think of some of Andy (Justin Kirk) and Doug’s (Kevin Nealon) early encounters, getting high and musing over whether rat-infested pot is safe to smoke, then concluding that “fire kills plague,” the duo’s recent dalliances into smuggling illegal immigrants over the border look farcical but somewhat inadequate by comparison. And once Doug devolved into a lust-lorn stupor over his illegal girlfriend Maria and managed to gross her and everyone else out along the way, it fell in the same territory as Silas’ (Hunter Parrish) and Shane’s (Alexander Gould) affairs: vaguely amusing and vaguely disturbing, sure, but not really all that funny.

Celia’s (Elizabeth Perkins) struggles with addiction were occasionally good for a laugh, but her fumbling and fuming hit the same comedic note over and over again. In making amends with her family, Celia had a chance to show us a new side of herself, but she went through the process of recovery with the same stoic stare and gritted teeth. Didn’t Celia seem more multifaceted and colorful in the early days back in Agrestic? And her future path, being held for ransom in Mexico by her angry daughter Quinn (a character we forgot existed), seems destined to keep her in the same seething state indefinitely.

But it looks like the whole gang might relocate south of the border at this point: Silas and Andy are fired up to start growing pot down there, and by end of the finale, a move starts to look imminent for Nancy, too. As Silas and Shane seethe over Nancy’s bad mothering at home, Nancy drives over the border to confront Esteban.

Flanked by his men, Esteban asks her again if she was the snitch. Nancy denies that she was involved. Esteban shows her a photograph of herself speaking to Till. Nancy, eyes wide, pulls her own photograph out of her purse: An ultrasound of Esteban’s unborn child! “It’s a little early to tell, but it feels like a boy.”

Nancy, you dirty whore, you get yourself knocked up, then you use your unborn child’s life to save your own? You are truly an inspiration to distracted, self-interested unwed mothers nationwide.

As the miscreants of “Weeds” mature into full-blown criminal nomads, let’s hope that they don’t abandon comedy completely for the sake of unexpected or farcical plot twists. Part of what made “Weeds” so addictive during its first two seasons was its grounding in the relatable, everyday life of suburban moms, small-minded city councilmen, resentful teens and ne’er-do-well potheads. While it may be fun at first to wipe away the old setting and start pulling fantastical scenarios out of a sombrero, some of the original charms of the show have been lost along the way. Maybe next season, even in the dusty hinterlands of Mexico, these scrappy outlaws will serve up the relatable stories and the laughs that had us hooked from the start.

Now normally, I might not notice the fake-smoke-flavored ham or the chirpily distracted cashiers, except that the stubborn mediocrity of the place makes me hypersensitive to the countless managerial mistakes unfolding before my eyes. Soon I start to wonder if I’m the only one who’s bothered by the ants crawling across the floors or the strong smell of ammonia in the air or the walls the color of baby poo or the murals depicting local sights, murals that look half-finished and that include an illustration of the front of the restaurant itself.

But there’s another, more corporate place nearby where everything is right. The tables and chairs are made of smooth wood and are perfectly placed, the menu is tastefully designed, the lighting makes everyone look like models at a photo shoot, classical music soothes patrons from a safe distance, cool breezes blow in the open French doors, and the small cup of gazpacho they serve has little slices of melon and a dab of pesto in it. Delightful! But it’s always crowded with people who have expensive haircuts and alarmingly nice shoes, so you end up waiting a long time for a table, and then sit in a corner alone, savoring an $8 cup of gazpacho while wondering, “What does she do to afford those shoes?”

As repellent and deeply wrong as the local cafe is, the overpriced, meticulously designed corporate eatery seems certain to transform you, slowly but surely, into the kind of person who pays too much for haircuts and shoes, the kind of person who experiences gazpacho that doesn’t have a little dab of pesto in it the way the rest of us experience a herd of middle-of-the-room flies. And therein lies the paradox of American upward mobility: The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, until you can barely breathe. You become like Julianne Moore in “Safe,” suffering from a nervous breakdown when the delivery guys bring a black couch instead of the white one she ordered. You become the kind of hothouse flower who only feels comfortable in perfectly calibrated, beautiful spaces, the kind of person who’s never satisfied and can’t play nicely with others.

Keepin’ it real estate
Which brings us to the best comedy on television right now: “Flipping Out” (10 p.m. EDT Tuesdays on Bravo), in which “real estate investor” (aka flipper) Jeff Lewis parades his apparent personality disorders in front of the camera for all to see.

“Flipping Out” bestrides the professional-entrepreneur reality show genre like a colossus. This isn’t just another “Blow Out” or “Work Out,” nor is it merely one of those shows aimed at allowing catty viewers to feel superior to the sad sacks depicted therein. No. “Flipping Out” is a work of pure comic genius. “Flipping Out” is the new “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — only better.

Like Larry David, Jeff Lewis is always trying to get the upper hand on his apparent sociopathic or narcissistic or obsessive-compulsive urges. He calmly explains, in the show’s second season premiere, that he’s really trying to take things more lightly and not sweat the small stuff these days. Then he has this exchange with his assistant Jenni regarding the precise temperature of the latte she just fetched him.

Jeff: Is this 140 [degrees]? Really?

Jenni: Yeah.

Jeff: Honestly, I think it’s like 150 or 155. It’s not 140.

Jenni: She said out loud 140.

Jeff: It’s not 140.

Jenni: Is it too hot?

Jeff: It’s 150.

Jenni: It’s 140! Come on!

Jeff: It’s not 140! Trust me, I know what 140 is. I drink these every day! (Pause.) But it’s OK. It’s fine. It’ll cool off. You know what? I’m not going to worry about it. I’m not going to worry about it.

Jenni: Good.

Long pause.

Jeff: But what’s interesting is, it doesn’t say 140 on here.

Jeff Lewis has impeccable comic timing. He knows when to pause. He knows when to lower his voice. He’s perfected the art of the tag line. He’s exactly the sort of tortured tragicomic character who belongs in a Jonathan Franzen novel. He tries so hard to overcome his flaws and compulsions, but he never quite succeeds.

If the first season of “Flipping Out” introduced Jeff’s struggle to thrive as an entrepreneur in a world that has never lived up to his expectations, the second season of the show is the perfect sequel to the first. With the real estate market in a slump, Jeff has been forced to take on consulting work with a boss who’s richer, more powerful and possibly even more difficult than he is.

“He [Jeff] shows up to a job site for 30 minutes a day and screams and yells at people,” says business partner and ex-boyfriend Ryan. “And now all of a sudden he’s in this world where he can’t just fire his answer right back at somebody, or scream and yell at somebody.”

Ryan is the ultimate straight-man sidekick who’s there to set up Jeff’s best punch lines. Ryan draws Jeff out, and Jeff obligingly rambles on about his psychological state, like he did during a business lunch with Ryan in the show’s season premiere last week.

Jeff: So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been kind of, like, really mellow this week? Like I said the other day, I feel like I’m medicated but not medicated? (Excitedly) I think I’m depressed. I think I’m actually depressed! And I’ll tell you why: I feel like I was on top of the world. I feel like we were flipping all these homes, six at a time, making a ton of money, I’m my own boss. And now, it’s like everything’s changed. At what point did I become a prostitute? Because that’s what I feel like. And I’m depressed. I’m seriously depressed!

Ryan tells Jeff to suck it up and put his ego aside, but Jeff won’t have any of it. “I’m being punished. God’s punishing me. I’ve seriously thought about that. I mean, I don’t think God screwed up the real estate market to punish Jeff Lewis. I’m not that much of a narcissist.”

Oh, yes, you are, Jeff. Don’t be shy about it now!

By the way, remember the reader mail for this column last week, where some readers claimed that Americans think that they’re whores when they deign to do work that’s not purely creative and inspired and free from the tedious limits of commerce? Well, Jeff certainly supports that argument.

But Jeff isn’t just incorrigible. He isn’t just neurotic. He isn’t just insufferable. Like any great character, he’s unpredictable and complicated and, at times, even a tiny bit likable. Jeff Lewis belongs with Tony Soprano and Nate Fisher and Don Draper in the pantheon of TV’s most fascinating antiheroes. He’s quintessentially American in his habit of wanting far, far too much, more than is good for him. His team of underlings keeps his house as spotless as a showroom under the auspices of keeping the property salable (he always lives in one of his redesigned properties until he finds a buyer for it), filling their days by sweeping up every last leaf on the patio, trimming dead leaves from Jeff’s plants and turning the bottles of water in Jeff’s refrigerator to face the front. Lewis’ obsessive-compulsive tics are indulged, day in and day out, in the name of his profession.

But it’s clear enough that Jeff can’t relax in any environment that isn’t pathologically fastidious. While he might say that his aim is to make enough money flipping houses so he can work less, he’s clearly a workaholic who’s chosen a business that invades every free corner of his life and his time for a reason. His friends are his employees. His home is a perpetual open house. He circles like a shark, picking lint off the couch and wondering what will go wrong next. And when something does go wrong, he’s flooded with emotions he can’t control. One tiny mishap or flaw sends him spiraling downward, convinced that God has it out for him.

And what’s funnier than a depressed, narcissistic obsessive-compulsive? “Flipping Out” charts the slow unraveling of an American archetype: the perfection-fetishist. It’s a cautionary tale for the control freak — which means it should appeal to at least half of the population in this pampered land of ours.

Home by the sea
The other half will relate to Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) of “Weeds” (10 p.m. EDT Mondays on Showtime), absent-mindedly sipping on her lukewarm Frappuccino while batting her eyes at yet another drug dealer who finds a use for her innocent white-lady looks. Although Nancy wants all the same things that Jeff Lewis wants — big piles of cash, pretty stuff, an enormous house by the sea — she can’t be bothered to attend to any of the details along the way. She’s the distracted, ineffectual, largely absent matriarch who wants to figure out some way to avoid working for a living altogether.

Ah, yes. More than the pot cultivation or the drug smuggling or the high banter, nothing offends quite like the unapologetically lazy, irresponsible mother. In America, no one is more loathed and despised than she is. This is a character who could never exist on network TV, even now, in the age of celebrating and embracing the dysfunctional among us. When dads ignore their kids, it’s funny. When moms do it, it’s tragic.

Plenty of people probably can’t tolerate Nancy Botwin, but personally, I get a little charge when she mumbles and whines and rolls her eyes for the millionth time. This woman makes the world safe for sloppy, daydreaming assholes like me, the sorts of people who struggle with recurring urges to hide in the broom closet rather than change another dirty diaper. Even though we’re soothed and comforted by our love and fierce protectiveness of our children, our inner teenagers are still petulant about having to wake up early and refrain from saying “fuck” when the little mimics are within earshot. And while it shouldn’t be considered courageous to suggest that flawed, distracted parents don’t generally end up chaining their kids to toilets in the basement, in these judgmental times, implying such a thing is brave, indeed.

This season, Nancy is a little more bratty than usual, too, having torched her home back in Agrestic in the hopes of getting the DEA off her scent. Her adopted home with a disapproving, somewhat loserly father-in-law, Lenny (played by Albert Brooks! Hallelujah!), will do for now, but Nancy needs to make some big money and fast if she’s going to keep her family satisfied and fed in their new coastal hideaway.

Money is also the key to Lenny’s heart, not surprisingly. “Listen, Bonnie and Clyde,” he says to Nancy and her brother-in-law Andy. “I don’t know what you two are running from, and you know what? I don’t care. Why don’t you just give me $300 in cash, right now, and the subject is dead?” Andy chuckles, but Nancy calmly opens her purse, pulls out $300 in cash, and hands the bills to Lenny.

Meanwhile, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) is stuck in jail, thanks to the fact that her name is on the title to Nancy’s former grow house. Why is Celia always punished on this show? Last season she was humiliated when she discovered that Nancy was sleeping with her lover, and now she’s being tortured in jail. When she asks about her chances of going free, her disorganized lawyer responds, “Anti-drug crusader caught with grow house? You’re fucked like a stray dog in Chinatown.”

Despite the change of scenery and the welcome addition of Brooks, this fourth season of “Weeds” isn’t all that different from the seasons that came before. Here’s Nancy, being schooled by yet another deeply corrupt but exacting drug entrepreneur. Here are the kids, poised to stir up trouble in whatever misguided ways they can. Here’s Celia, looking to nail Nancy for dumping her as a friend. (I sort of miss the days when those two were friends, don’t you? Nancy could use a good friend, particularly now that her former business partner, Conrad, is out of the picture.)

Even with the same repeating story lines, the truth is I could watch 10 or 12 episodes of “Weeds” in a row, simply to follow Nancy around, slurping on her adult-size sippy cup, cocking her head and trying to figure out a good angle on whatever messed-up situation she’s in at the moment. She’s a hero to our inner teenagers, and we want her to get rich, damn it, rich as royalty! Let’s show the world that irresponsible, lackadaisical mothers are just as entitled to big piles of cash as the tightly wound, obsessive-compulsive workaholics who more typically acquire them.

Besides, it would be interesting, to see what might happen if Nancy became a drug kingpin and got loaded. Would she stop sipping on the dregs of Frappuccinos and insist that they be kept at the perfect icy temperature? Would she hire a full-time nanny and send her kids to pricey private schools? Would she finally have the free time and money to become detail-oriented and fastidious? Would she finally have the free time and money to feel truly, deeply dissatisfied?

After all, that’s the dream, isn’t it? Instead of training our minds to appreciate the little comforts of our humble existences, we yearn to become more and more precious, to surround ourselves with increasingly beautiful things, to hoard our stuff and our free time and our obscene piles of money until all of that beauty and space and meticulous perfection melts into an unbearably inadequate, fly-infested, profane mess.

Here’s to keeping the dream alive!