Still smokin'

Showtime's "Weeds" grows stronger and even more unruly in its sophomore season, sending safe, suburban family life up in smoke.

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: TV, Showtime, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Heather Havrilesky

Mary-Louise Parker and Elizabeth Perkins

Aug. 14, 2006 | Writers have always relished the suburbs as a nice, clean canvas against which a messy outsider can best take shape. On a pristine suburban landscape, flaws -- whether they're rust and blemishes and dirty windows or financial setbacks and chronic illnesses and existential angst -- have a way of standing out. This suffocatingly immaculate setting provides the perfect backdrop for Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), a slightly scattered widow whose attempt to support her family by selling pot (and more recently, growing it) forms the thrillingly deviant center of Showtime's "Weeds" (second season premieres 10 p.m. Monday). The show gets its name from Nancy's profession, but it also hints at those unruly parts of ourselves that spring up, uninvited, and mar every attempt at a perfect picture. This is damn fertile soil for a comedy, and creator Jenji Kohan and the writers of "Weeds" farm it for all it's worth in the show's second season, cultivating vivid, surprising stories that naturally transcend the typical limitations of the half-hour format.

"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."

Next page: What "Desperate Housewives" might have been