TiVo Lady

Showtime's Triple Play

The three best shows on television at this moment are all on Showtime:  they are Weeds, Brotherhood, and Dexter. 

I've already raved about Weeds, the funniest show about a marijuana-dealing suburban mom, ever.  Now, the second season of Brotherhood has just begun, and it's even better than the first.  Like The Sopranos, it's a complex and intriguing story about a family of Irish, not Italian, gangsters.  Only this one also includes a politician, Tommy Caffee, who's equally corrupt as his murdering, drug-dealing brother, Michael Caffee.  Every character in this show is morally corrupt--from the lovely, pot-smoking, unfaithful wife,  Eileen Caffee (playing by the lovely, not-Boomer, Annabeth Gish, born in 1971), to the upright-but-lying and loyally unfaithful matriarch, Rose Caffee, played by Fionnula Flanagan, a pre-Boomer born in 1941.

I love fast-moving, intelligent dialogue, but the plot is so deviously complicated and twisty, that I have to keep pausing the TiVo to figure out what it is, exactly, that has just happened.  And, of course, the other reason it works is simply because I care about these people, and their lives.  The writing makes me believe, utterly, that they are real.  A sample of the fine writing is this exchange between Judd Fitzgerald, the invisible puppeteer-in-a-wheelchair behind most of what goes on in Providence (played by Len Cariou), is talking to his protege, the incredibly ambitious Tommy Caffee.  They are at a funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq, and Fitzgerald observes that it's like a mass delusion.  "If we pretend not to be at war, these boys won't be dying."

Finally, there's Dexter, a taut thriller about a sincere and sympathetic serial killer--he only kills other  killers, people who deserve to die.  And the series focuses on his point of view.  I've watched this show from the very beginning, mostly because I loved the series of books on which it is based.  Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay, are wonderful murder mysteries, but less who-done-it than why-done-it.  And the Showtime series gets the tone of the books Exactly Right.

Michael C. Hall is perfect playing Dexter Hall, the murderer in question, and after the first episode or so, I completely forgot about his past as a reluctant, gay undertaker in Six Feet Under.

I believe that my TiVo is happy when it has shows this good to offer.

I Love Weed... er, Weeds

Weeds, on Showtime, has turned out to be one of my favorite shows of all time. It's quite funny, but also poignant, insightful, and sad.  Not only that, but Mary Louise Parker, who is simply adorable, happens to be a tail end Boomer, born in 1964. The somewhat shaky premise, in case you've missed the show, is that Nancy Botwin, played by Parker, was widowed and without a way to pay for her lavish McMansion in the skeevy suburb of Agrestic.  (I like to imagine the name as a hybrid of Aggressive/Majestic.)  The logical problem is why a cool, cute, and very hip mom/widow would want to stay in such a gag-worthy place.  So we have to suspend our disbelief, and accept the idea that she doesn't want to disrupt her children's lives after their father's death, and also that she can't find a legal job that would help pay the bills.

Thus does Nancy become a drug dealer, who eventually grows, processes, and sells her own high-quality stash.  In this week's episode, Nancy is attending the funeral of U-Turn, a very scary and very bad dealer of weed/heroin/etc. to whom she owed a lot of money.  He was making her life hell, as well as turning the series into a dark corner of desperation.  I was very happy when he had a heart attack, and then Marvin, his second-in-command, finished him off.  At the funeral, Nancy is dressed in black, speaking to another dealer.

Nancy, sniffling:  "He taught me how to drive by."  (She was driving her Prius, and U-Turn took several shots at rival Mexican dealers.  He liked the Toyota Hybrid, he said, because it was so quiet that nobody could hear him coming.)

Other guy, looking impressed:  "Respect."

Nancy:  "Thank you."

For a show that's all about drugs and sex and suburban despair, there are a lot more Boomers in the cast than you might expect.  Elizabeth Perkins, who is both perky and perfect as Nancy's off-balance, slightly-evil friend and neighbor, was born in 1960.  She is a fabulous-looking 47-year-old.  Kevin Nealon, born in 1953, plays the slimy former mayor, pothead, and all-around funny creep.

My only objection is with the "Special Features" section of the Weeds official website. I know some people enjoy hearing their favorite actors' opinions about the suburbs or weed-dealing or whatever, but there's a reason they're actors:  they can't write their own scripts!  So, please, don't make them ad lib:  it's painful!!