Friday, November 12, 2010

A Forthright Review Of Weeds From Showtime

By Mari Holt

One of the best and funniest tv shows of the last ten years would have to be Weeds. The show is one of many in the trend that defined television for the last decade: Realism. Weeds definitely belongs on your queue the next time you log into your TV and movie download service.

The realism trend probably began with shows like Survivor. See, for a time, TV shows were becoming incredibly predictable. You always knew exactly what was gonna happen, you knew every punchline to every joke, it was just the same old stuff time and again, and people just didn't care anymore. It wasn't hard for shows like Survivor and Top Chef to steal viewers away by the thousands.

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.

With fictional television, the first to really catch on was The Sopranos, which could have been just some mob show twenty years ago, but post-Survivor, it became much more, a show about a real character, Tony Soprano. In Goodfellas, all the characters have to worry about is mob stuff, who's gonna get whacked and so on. In Sopranos, Tony has to consider that, plus where is his daughter going for college? How does he deal with his own and his son's panic attacks? How does he make his wife happy? This was real life seeping into a fictional scenario.

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.

As you watch this suburban mom try to keep control of her situation, you'll find yourself rooting for her to really succeed with her marijuana dealership just as much as you'll be rooting for her to maintain her family situation. Think Roseanne meets Sopranos meets Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and that's almost, but not quite, what the show's all about.

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. - 42574

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