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 Entertainment | June 2008 
Sex and Drugs Rock On Showtime's "Weeds," "Call Girl"
 Joel Brown - MeeVee
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Showtime's offbeat comedy hit "Weeds" returns this week for its fourth-season premiere, with Mary-Louise Parker once again terrific as the dope-dealing suburban widow Nancy Botwin. I'm less enamored of "Secret Diary Of A Call Girl," the hit UK series starring Billie Piper that Showtime will debut right after "Weeds."
The tone of the two shows isn't a good match, and there's a crucial difference in the way they depict their lead characters. The actresses are both very good. But while Parker's beauty seems entirely part of her character, the glossy "Call Girl" is very much selling us Piper in fancy lingerie. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
"Weeds" fans will remember that we last saw Nancy on a Segway, rolling away from her burning home, as a giant brush fire roared through the planned community of Agrestic, California, where the first three seasons of the series were set. After three seasons of tumult, she was ready to leave it all behind and start fresh. Tonight Nancy and her sons and her tagalong brother-in-law Andy land in Ren Mar, a down-at-the-heels beach town on the coast, near the Mexican border.
Ren Mar is where her late husband Judah and Andy grew up. Their grandmother is dying in a hospital bed in the living room, and their estranged father, Lenny Botwin, takes care of her in a swirl of rage and sadness, in between losing money at the track. It's a grim situation. But Nancy needs a place for the family to lay up while she plans her next move. They're just going to have to find a way to put up with the cantankerous Lenny. That's going to be hard for them and fun for us, because Lenny is played by the great Albert Brooks.
Meanwhile, on the dope front, gangsta Guillermo says he may have work for Nancy, smuggling mota over the border from Mexico. Her teenaged son Silas is still toting around his precious MILF-weed seedlings in hopes of starting a new grow house.
Back home in the smoking ruins of Agrestic, the old grow house has discovered by the authorities. And Nancy's best frenemy Celia, technically the owner of the grow house, is ratting her out under the hilariously deadpan interrogation of Capt. Till (Jack Stehlin in a very nice turn).
Will the cops believe Celia and go after Nancy? Or will Doug and Dean and Isabelle convince them that Celia is the dope dealer? Could there be anything funnier than Celia in jail? How can you not watch a show where a police interrogation includes a sarcastic reference to the suspect's "magical house-earning pussy?"
Though also a dark comedy, "Call Girl" is much glossier than "Weeds," and its portrait of an independent woman working outside the law is less comedic, less appealing. "Dr. Who's" Piper plays Hannah, an independent young woman who hooks under the name Belle. We see her booking dates through her "agent," played by Cheri Lunghi, then meeting men in glossy hotel rooms and her own fabulous apartment. The sex scenes are vigorous but carefully choreographed to avoid showing genitalia. In the first two episodes, her clients include a middle-aged sad sack with fond memories of the barnyard and a lonely young man smarting from a breakup. There's also an obnoxious engineer who takes her to a high-class orgy where she dumps him for a purely recreational hookup with her favorite author - and his wife.
Hannah breaks the "fourth wall" to speak directly to the camera and declares herself free of hooker stereotypes of childhood sexual abuse, drug addiction and the like. She says she hook because she likes the money - and the sex. It's a post-feminist notion of prostitution, to be sure. And quite convenient for producers who want to sell a show about a beautiful and often scantily-clad whore without getting too dark and, uh, turning anyone off. There's something overtly porny about a show where the woman purrs, "Sometimes I get paid to do the things I've always wanted to do."
Not that "Call Girl" entirely ignores the shadows here. She cuts the young man from her client list when she realizes "he wants Hannah, not Belle." And in the second episode she is called away from her tryst with the author and his wife to a hospital where her sister has just given birth. The happy baby is almost more than she can cope with, and family tensions abound. But apparently they all believe her cover story, that she's a high-end legal secretary. Less easily snowed is her best friend, Ben (Iddo Goldberg,), an ex-boyfriend with whom she shares a warmth that's otherwise lacking from her life.
For all its frothy comedy, "Weeds" never forgets that dope dealing is for Nancy a way of acting out, a rebellion against the sudden death of her husband, the burden of caring for her family, the hypocrisy of her Agrestic neighbors. The show's central image came at the end of season two when Nancy, under pressure from every direction, jumped fully clothed into a swimming pool and sank to the bottom, where she finally allowed herself to scream.
Perhaps I shouldn't draw conclusions until I've finished watching the first eight episodes, but I don't see "Call Girl" ever diving into the deep end. |
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