I am – Hercules!!
Showtime on Monday night launches the second season of “Weeds,” last year’s best sitcom. It’s about a hot suburban hausfrau (Mary-Louise Parker) who make ends meet by dealing the doob after her uninsured husband gets smooshed to death. Now that her first-season “fakery’ (or fake bakery) has burned, she’s moved into production as well as distribution.
Entertainment Weekly gives it a “B-plus” and says:
… the second season adds the layers – the juicy unpredictabilities of behavior and subplots – that enrich the spicy sauciness. …
TV Guide says:
… While the higher-profile Desperate Housewives stumbled creatively, its thematic sibling on pay cable has become a sharper, darker, funnier satire in its sophomore go-round. …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
… Not only is "Weeds" the best series on "Showtime" -- run out immediately and get the first-season DVD, and do not delay in that quest -- but it's also one of the best shows on television, end of story. … First, it's important not to think of "Weeds" as a comedy (some might say dramedy) about marijuana and, specifically, a suburban widow who turns to dealing to maintain her lifestyle. That's merely the jumping-off point, the neat trick that sets up a series with a much bigger, less easily categorized agenda. …
The Los Angeles Times says:
… I like "Weeds" quite a bit, even granting that it often does not make sense. … It's perhaps appropriate to the subject matter that the show's main appeal is sensual rather than cerebral, grounded in a host of superb performances. (One of its five Emmy nominations is for casting, and it's well deserved.) Kevin Nealon, who never struck me as particularly amusing on "Saturday Night Live" or anywhere else, is consistently good as Nancy's accountant-customer-business partner and especially funny in his scenes with the excellent Justin Kirk as her wooly brained, id-driven brother-in-law, who this year has become a rabbinical student to escape being sent to fight in Iraq — they make a kind of upper-middle-class, very white Cheech & Chong. Tonye Patano continues fine as Nancy's connection, and Shoshanna Stern is wonderfully deep in her short scenes as Nancy's older son's girlfriend. And there is Donovan, long beloved of Hal Hartley, and a nice match for Parker: The two simmer at the same low boil. I could go on: Everyone's good. But Parker, who won a Golden Globe this year, is the heart of it all: Her performance largely defines how you read the others, and she plays it like Alice in Wonderland, her eyes growing large with wonder or excitement or disappearing protectively under half-lowered lids. (She has the sexiest squint since Clint Eastwood.) She has the ability to make all around her seem like a dream and to walk her character untouched through strange and unsanitary places. It makes her good to know.
Variety says:
… still isn't quite funny or startling enough to become a compulsion but delivers enough tantalizing hits to merit the TiVo "season pass" treatment. Much of that has to do with [Justin] Kirk, who, as Andy, has become the equivalent of the Ari character on "Entourage" -- someone who bursts onto the screen and delivers laugh-out-loud moments on a program that otherwise generates little more than wry smiles. Even saddled with a subpar plot line -- he's desperate to get into rabbinical school to avoid being shipped off to Iraq -- Kirk's performance shines. … And if "Weeds" doesn't deliver belly laughs, to say it's moderately addictive isn't just blowing smoke.
The Hollywood Reporter says:
…Showtime's deliciously politically incorrect comedy returns for a second season in wickedly wonderful style, supplying further evidence from the outset just how much … Mary-Louise Parker got jobbed for failing to land an Emmy nomination for lead comedy actress. … As the season's first three episodes underscore, producer and chief writer Kohan weaves a charmingly dysfunctional tapestry that's rarely forced. It makes mincemeat of conventional TV taboos and has, in Parker, a star whom the camera adores. She's an actress whose right-on-the-surface neuroses make her somehow more attractive and believable, not less.
10 p.m. Monday. Showtime.
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