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Downton Abbey Mary Matthew Kissing
September 18, 2012
FILM & TELEVISION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

NOW TV: ‘Revolution’ Starts, ‘Abbey’ & ‘Empire’ Return

I’m going to begin this completely off headline and mention the Weeds finale on Sunday night, which was nothing like what I was expecting.  And that’s about the only half-assed, backhanded compliment I can give it.

I did a little snooping around the TV fan forums a week or so ago to see what people thought of the last season, which doesn’t appear to be much.  It seems I was one of the few who thought it was an improvement over seasons five and six; everyone else thought it was slow, unworthy of the show, which must mean it was leading up to something big.  While reading posts and threads, I stumbled on one by a guy, presumably a Ghey, who postulated that this entire season was a dream Nancy was having while in a coma after being shot in the head.  Everything was being reconciled in her subconscious: she was moving towards being legit, finally a good mother to her youngest child, and had come complete circle to live once again in the idyllic but more upscale ‘burbs that are Old Sandwich, CT (a play on Old Greenwich).  In the last episode, wrote the poster, the story would come back to the hospital where Nancy was really brain dead, and the gang would pull the plug, Nancy’s body would die, everyone would sob.  End of series.

No such luck.  Instead we were treated to a flash forward nine years or so from the penultimate episode to her youngest son’s bar mitzvah, which brings everyone together for lots of hand wringing and reconciling and moments of not-very-lucid insight into themselves, and then this lame ending with everyone passing around a legal joint, and even Nancy—who has hitherto been limited to sucking on iced lattes through a straw—takes a toke.

The interminable final shot in Weeds delivers zero emotion.

However, as lame as I found it, an online friend loved it, and was howling last night about how an era was over.  Then again, he’s Canadian—pot is a birthright for them, and an emotional issue with their hated, hateful cousins south of the border.

So, no more Ma Botwin and her man children.  Onward.

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By James Killough
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Hunter Parrish
September 4, 2012
FILM & TELEVISION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

‘Weeds’ Grows Stronger and Dies

Super-talented movie actresses tend fall somewhere along a sliding Kinsey-type scale of personality, with the humble, hard-working, charming type like Meryl Streep as a 1, and the volcanic, impossible dragon lady like Faye Dunaway as a 6.  Tilda Swinton would be a 1.5, Cate Blanchett a 2.5, Jodie Foster a 4.5, and Mary-Louise Parker a solid 6.  From my brief personal experience of her, and the experiences of friends and colleagues, Parker is as rabid a meshugana bitch as they come.  But she also races roadrunner circles around most other performers in terms of raw skill; the difficult personality probably has a lot to do with the fact she’s also ferociously intelligent.  Still, it’s no excuse; so are Streep and Swinton.

Parker set the tone for Weeds eight seasons ago by creating a memorable strong female lead that nobody had ever seen before, and for the first three it was some of the best programming on premium cable.  Then Parker’s character Nancy Botwin burned down her house in the SoCal suburban community of Agrestic, and the show floated off into a caricature of itself.  Most of the believability was lost, although it enjoyed a brief return to balance when Alanis Morissette joined the cast as an obstetrician engaged to Justin Kirk’s often-irritating, sometimes-engaging character Andy, Nancy’s brother-in-law.

Mary-Louise Parker Weeds

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By James Killough
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