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.

So, while reality TV may be, at times, crass and artless, and not to mention, they often rearrange events with editing to make situations seem more dramatic than they really were, the fact remains that they had some appeal in their unpredictability and real human situations which stole a lot of viewers away from the fictional television shows which were really not offering anything new, and really hadn't since Seinfeld and Drew Carey went off the air.

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 the same trend, with a really funny concept: A suburban single mother makes ends meet by selling weed. It's part stoner humor, part crime story and part family drama, and very 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.

As you watch this suburban mom try to keep control of her situation, you'll find yourself rooting for her to really succeed with her marijuana dealership just as much as you'll be rooting for her to maintain her family situation. Think Roseanne meets Sopranos meets Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and that's almost, but not quite, what the show's all about.

The show is quite addictive, of course. It's structured as such that each episode is only a chapter and each season is really a self contained story, so download a full season at a time and be ready to spend several hours a night catching up on what happens next. Don't worry, it's an incredibly rewarding show and each season is well worth the time it takes to sit down and watch it all in one or two sittings, just be fore warned that you WILL be sitting there watching half a season or a full season every single time you want to watch a single episode. Think of it like Lays potato chips: Betcha can't have just one. - 40732

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