Friday, November 12, 2010

A Forthright Review Of Weeds From Showtime

By Mari Holt

If there's been a defining trend for the last ten years, it has been the tendency towards realism in fictional television. Blame it on reality television, which really changed the landscape for all of television. Weeds is one of the funniest in this trend and definitely deserves a spot on your list next time you're downloading from your tv and movie download service.

It began with reality television. See, for a time, fictional television had just plain gotten too darn formulaic. It always felt like you were just watching mindless television. It always came down to the same characters: The wacky neighbors, the football loving dads and their football widows, stories about the kid borrowing the car without asking and so on, and... It was just really predictable.

So, while reality TV may be, at times, crass and artless, and not to mention, they often rearrange events with editing to make situations seem more dramatic than they really were, the fact remains that they had some appeal in their unpredictability and real human situations which stole a lot of viewers away from the fictional television shows which were really not offering anything new, and really hadn't since Seinfeld and Drew Carey went off the air.

The first show to adapt and survive in this new television climate was The Sopranos. Twenty years ago, it could have just been some mafia show. See, in Goodfellas, the characters worry about the business, but on The Sopranos, the characters worry about business as well as family, personal finances, their relations with their friends, sex, health, psychological well being and so on. You know, everything we have to worry about in real life.

Weeds follows a suburban widow and her two sons as they deal with family issues and... The family business. It follows Sopranos in a way, in that the family business is... Well, she's a weed dealer. She sells pot to all of the local yuppie potheads. A constant source of humor is the fact that she doesn't always fit in with the shallow vapid people of her neighborhood, being a weed dealer amidst investment bankers and soccer moms.

The show is really defined by some great characters. The Candyman is one of the best. She's actually a female character, codenamed the Candyman. She runs a bakery that specializes in marijuana goodies. She's also a fitness nut, refusing to sell to anyone who doesn't promise to exercise and burn off the extra calories provided by her brownies and cupcakes.

When you watch the show, you have two big plot threads to root on: First of all, she has to keep her family in order and make sure her children are safe and happy, and secondly, she wants to keep building her weed empire to eventually become the primary provider of primo stuff in her sprawling suburban community.

Be warned, it's addictive. Like Lost or The Sopranos, you can't just watch one or two episodes. Each season is structured as a single story separated into chapters by each episode, so if you're going to download one, you may as well download a dozen or you'll find yourself waiting for hours between episodes to see what happens next. - 42569

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