Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Weeds Is A Showtime TV Hit Series About Selling Pot

By Alexis Snow

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.

It began with reality television. See, for a time, fictional television had just plain gotten too darn formulaic. It always felt like you were just watching mindless television. It always came down to the same characters: The wacky neighbors, the football loving dads and their football widows, stories about the kid borrowing the car without asking and so on, and... It was just really predictable.

Along came reality television. Say what you will about it, but it did make some changes. TV producers found that viewers really responded better to more realistic scenarios, more real people. Even if reality shows are staged, even if they can be crass and artless, the fact remains that they use real human emotions and drama to build the whole package, even if that real drama is sometimes twisted around in editing to seem more extreme than it really is.

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 the same trend and utilizes a great concept: Suburban single mom runs a massive marijuana selling empire. You get an equal mix of great stoner humor, crime storytelling and family drama, and it's always funny.

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.

The show follows two primary plot threads: One following the mother's journey in building her criminal empire, and one following her family issues and the local gossip. Watching how the two stories affect one another is always worth a laugh.

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. - 40729

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