Weed dealing middle class woman in "Weeds" looks good

[J Bananas]

LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- Showtime's new half-hour series "Weeds" is a blast, a wry, well-written look at the life of the pot dealer next door in small-screen suburbia.

Star Mary-Louise Parker is surely due for some laudatory ink for her performance as a cul-de-sac mom who turns to selling marijuana in her gated community ("Agrestic, California") to pay the bills (in cash) after her husband drops dead while jogging with their 8-year-old son.

Parker brings a deft touch in her portrayal of Nancy Botwin, a woman who's no longer young but not quite middle-aged. She's still a good-hearted, well-meaning, lunch-packing soccer mom, but she's also hip enough to finesse her new line of work and hold her own with the black family in Los Angeles that supplies her wholesale pot.

"Weeds," which bows Sunday, hails from Lions Gate Television and Jenji Kohan, a woman with comedy in her DNA, being the daughter of veteran scribe Buz Kohan and sister of "Will & Grace" co-creator David Kohan. She was on the writing rebound last year after having a rough time with short-lived CBS comedy "The Stones," so she went out of her way to write a new project that violated most if not all of the cardinal rules of sitcom-dom.

"It was sort of my anti-network homage," Kohan says. "I wanted to engage in some really flawed characters. I became obsessed with wanting to explore the gray areas of life as opposed to everything being so black and white. I was weary of three jokes a page."

"Weeds" is augmented by a strong supporting cast, including Elizabeth Perkins as the alpha mom in the neighborhood who is both friend and foe to Nancy, and Tonye Patano as the matriarch of the large, highly organized pot-dealing operation in the big city that becomes a refuge for Botwin.

The casting and the recruiting of Brian Dannelly -- hot off the buzz from last year's "Saved!" -- as director of the pilot came together in the easiest possible way, and the project became a labor of love for most on the set, Kohan says.

But Kohan also would like to make one thing clear: "Weeds" was deliberately built around a provocative premise to give it a bit of instant edge; autobiographical, it ain't.

"I wanted to find something that was a little edgy and a little racy," Kohan says. "But I lead a fairly conventional life. I get my ya-yas on the page."

[Bramsterdam (see ya)]

I saw this advertised on show case, I wanna check it out

[JMan]

no offence sounds like they kinda ripped a show we got on mtv:uk called Top Buzzer, is about a weed dealer and his friends and tha shit they get up too, is like the only show that could possibly make a known weed smoker want a blaze, anyway ill look out for his show if it hits the uk..