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“Uncle Jesse! Uncle Jesse!”

You knew it was going to be a crazy week when The Rippers tried to have band practice in the basement while Michelle was home sick from preschool. When she wandered downstairs during a particularly raucous version of The Beach Boys “Cocomo” and said, “Uncle Jesse, you’re making noise!” I almost thought I was going to squirt milk out my nose — because I was watching the episode drinking a tall glass of 2% milk and munching on some graham crackers. Of course, once Stephanie got home from girl scouts things didn’t improve much for The Ripper’s chances on being ready before their big gig. More after the jump…

That’s when I realized I was watching TV Land and not Showtime. You’d be surprised how many times this happens to me.

Run Silas! It’s a vampire!!

Oh tiny Michelle, how you’ve fallen. Once the epicenter of cute, now sleepwalking through a role as a super-devout Christian/pot-head on America’s second favorite premium cable network. Actually, maybe that fall isn’t all that drastic (she could have been on Californication). Here, the role is little more than stunt-casting (unlike Matthew Modine whose character is brilliantly hilarious) as she’s not particularly interesting and certainly not a source of comedy — though I would probably say the same thing of Silas’ entire narrative arc. He’s all exposition, with romantic entanglements added to give the audience something to look at (what, like Mary-Louise Parker wasn’t enough?).

Outside of Mary-Kate’s bland appearance, the significant action had to do with U-Turn and his insistence on transforming Nancy to his second in command… for some reason. If I were a major drug kingpin I would definitely see the advantage of having a hot suburban mom in my crew. She’d allow me to diversify my portfolio. But the notion that she should be the heavy is pretty asinine, even for this show.

By episode’s end it all made sense as to why the writers were going this way (Marvin gets jealous, sees an opportunity to take out U-Turn and then does so), but it didn’t make it any less contrived.

The bigger problem, as I saw it, wasn’t so much U-Turn’s curious fascination with Nancy-as-Lieutenant but as a sudden shift in the character’s presentation. U-Turn has always been a stereotype, but this week he was finally being shown as a character with some depth — not a lot of depth, but depth just the same. He was a hardcore gangster, but one that might have read The Seven Habits of Highly Affective People. Granted, he’s dead now so it doesn’t much matter.

The U-Turn/Nancy training sequences weren’t particularly funny but they were enjoyable to watch. Between the boxing and the hill climbing and even the run-in at the grow house you could tell Nancy was having fun — perhaps to her ultimate demise. It’s hard to tell. Marvin is such a live wire.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under Showtime, Weeds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.