This weekend we got a hold of the rest of season 6 of Weeds and the first 8 episodes of season 7 and proceeded to watch them all back to back because they’re like goddamn Eet-Sum-Mors – once you get started it’s too easy to just pop the next one in your brain and chew away.
If you’ve fallen behind in the show and are planning on watching all the newer episodes, it’s only fair to issue a spoiler alert before I launch into this particular diatribe as it has to do with the current direction the show’s taken and what I’ve come to realise is the trouble with Nancy Botwin.
At the beginning of Weeds Nancy was a great character. She was this sassy suburban milf who was dealing weed badly to anyone who would buy it in the sleepy little town of Agrestic (a fictional suburb of Los Angeles) because she’d lost her husband unexpectedly and was trying desperately to make ends meet.
Very early on in the series, two things quickly become apparent, 1) Nancy has gigantic balls on her, big hairy ones that see her getting herself into all kinds of trouble as she slowly sinks deeper into the criminal underworld and 2) She is so fucking impulsive it’s scary.
These two character traits seem to serve her well in the beginning, but ultimately lead to her making some very, very fucked up decisions, namely:
- Marrying a DEA agent
- Involving Andy and Doug in her ever-expanding marijuana business, despite the fact that they are both lazy, unreliable and pretty much functionally retarded
- Befriending the ex-wife of the DEA agent after she has him killed
- Enlisting the help of the slimeball Mexican drug dealer Guillermo
- Burning her house to the ground
- Boning the mayor and crime lord of Tijuana, Esteban Reyes, falling pregnant with his child and then marrying him
- Lying to Silas for his entire life about who his father was
Those are just the few that come to mind, but there are many, many more that literally had me groaning whilst watching out of sheer “why-the-fuck-did-you-just-do-that?!†exasperation.
Sure, it’s a TV show and if she just did the right thing all the time, it would be pretty boring to watch, but the result of all the fucked up, and in many cases selfish decisions she’s made over the course of the show is that I really don’t like her as a character anymore.
Especially in season seven where, after serving a 3 year stint in prison, she is released early and finally given a shot at a new life in a halfway house in New York only to jump straight back into the weed selling business and start all the shit that fucked her life up all over again!
The trouble with Nancy Botwin is that, seven seasons in, she hardly has one redeeming quality that makes me sympathise with her any more. She’s just a hopeless drug dealer who drags her poor family into her fucked up little world again and again and again and seems to feel no remorse for doing so.
The key lesson here kids is never deal weed, no matter how tempting it may seem.
But tune in next week for a breakdown of the latest series of Breaking Bad where the ley lesson is never cook crystal meth (SUCH a fucking awesome show. The main guy is the dad from Malcolm In The Middle, but you’d NEVER guess it).
-ST
