“Weeds” — Sh*t Highway
I really loved in the opening scene (between Nancy and the DEA agent looking for the presumed dead, Peter) that Nancy never really looked the guy in the eyes. She looked everywhere, just not at him. Mary Louise Parker is great at this sort of thing, and is really the main reason I stick with this wildly uneven series. But is that enough? More after the jump…
Weeds has gotten into the curious trend of having episodes with no beginning and no ending. We always seem to start with the previous week’s cliffhanger – a situation that never ends up being quite as dire as we were led to believe – and then just stops 25 minutes later. It’s turned into a series of all middles, but like an Oreo only having a middle is gluttonous and a little messy. We need the chocolate cookies to bookend the episodes. We need them because they are delicious and make eating the damn things so much easer.
I’m a big proponent of serialized drama, but each episode needs to try and tell a story. What was the story this week? Nancy gets paranoid? Silas does community service? Matthew Modine joins the cast as a real estate developer specializing in faith-based communities? Well, yes, but where’s the arc? What has anyone learned? How many sentences in this paragraph can I end with a question mark? [six]
This would be OK if the series was continuing to deliver the big laughs. It is not. It’s delivering mild chuckles. Mild chuckles are enjoyable and make one happy to be alive, but they also lead to distractions – like checking out the cable-guide to see what will be on later in the week and making numerous trips to the kitchen looking for snacks that simply aren’t there (note to self: buy snacks). What I want is big laughs, even if there are only one or two per episode. Weeds hasn’t made me laugh big in nearly a month. This, I find frustrating.
There were the requisite highlights. Doug getting back on the council was mildly entertaining, as was his late night pow-wow with the rest of the council while sitting around the model of “Majestic,†the new community being built literally around Agrestic. Even I was mesmerized by the light that would turn on and off in the model church with the flick of a switch. Elsewhere, Andy’s time at army took an unexpected turn when a simple fart-lighting contest between he and another cadet ended with a missile being lodged in the chest of the other guy as Andy bent over posing for a cell-phone video. Totally random and unnecessary? Absolutely. Funny? Eh.
What am I going to do, not watch? Hardly. It isn’t like there are five other things on during that time slot every Monday. No wait. There are. Man, Rick, what’s up with chugging all that Haterade?
