Wednesday, August 25, 2010

See Showtime's New TV Hit Series Weeds

By Alexis Snow

For the last ten years, there's been a defining trend in fictional television: Realism. It started with reality television and influenced fictional television before long like Sopranos, and Weeds is definitely one of the funniest in this trend, and certainly belongs on your downloads queue the next time you pay a visit to your tv and movie download service.

This trend towards realism began with shows like Survivor, which wound up really killing fictional shows in the ratings. See, sitcoms and dramas became incredibly formulaic and predictable. You always knew the punchline of every joke before it came: I get it, the dad likes watching football and the wacky neighbor wants to date his daughter.

Reality television really changed things and it became clear that fictional television had to adapt to survive, as people had come to prefer the realism of those reality shows. Even if reality television can be artless, crass, and not as real as it pretends to be, it remains a fact that it showed real human emotion and unpredictable situations.

The first show to adapt and survive in this new television climate was The Sopranos. Twenty years ago, it could have just been some mafia show. See, in Goodfellas, the characters worry about the business, but on The Sopranos, the characters worry about business as well as family, personal finances, their relations with their friends, sex, health, psychological well being and so on. You know, everything we have to worry about in real life.

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 includes a lot of hilarious characters, like her supplier, a saucy old black woman in low rent housing who runs a family of her own with her street dealers, and The Candyman, a woman who seems based on that "Stop the Insanity!" fitness guru. She runs a bakery, and refuses to sell to any customers who don't promise to work out to burn off the fat they get from her excellent brownies, cakes and cupcakes.

When you watch the show, you have two big plot threads to root on: First of all, she has to keep her family in order and make sure her children are safe and happy, and secondly, she wants to keep building her weed empire to eventually become the primary provider of primo stuff in her sprawling suburban community.

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.

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