tv: Last Night the series finale of Weeds aired. This is a show that started off with such a bang, earning critical and fan acclaim. Mary Louise Parker was awe inspiring. Kevin Nealon found a new home as one of the funniest men on television, a title he held long ago on Saturday Night Live. We were introduced to Justin Kirk, who played uncle Andy, and learned to love his lost, sarcastic view of life. But maybe most importantly we all bought into what Nancy was selling. The show as a cutting edge look at life in the suburbs and the role that weed plays in that world. It showed us the more or less harmless effect smoking it could have while the dealing aspect was shown as threatening. Weeds was the freshest hottest show on TV.
As with most shows though, even premium cable shows that have shorter seasons, it may have outstayed its welcome after a full eight seasons on Showtime. Having left Agrestic after the third season for different scenery and bigger stories, the show began to lack its initial impact. It is not to say that Weeds was never good after the end of the third season. It just wasn't as good, and was only good in flashes. And that lack of impact as exactly how the show ended.
Watching the series finale I was surprised by how many important points they managed to touch on while not resonating emotionally at all. Silas was finally able to acknowledge his love of his mother while achieving the independent life he always wanted. Andy was finally able to break free of Nancy's hold and create a fulfilling life for himself, caring for his child with his wife Megan (yes "deaf" Megan) and running a legal marijuana business. And maybe most importantly, Shane agreed to seek the help, through rehab and therapy, that he has needed since the show began. All of these character growths viewers had been waiting for the entire series were overshadowed, however, by an unnecessary trip into nostalgia with long lost characters who no long have a place in Nancy's world, a total lack of conflict, the need to create an end for the character of Doug, who is the only character not named Botwin to be in every episode, that ended up feeling more forced than emotional. The nostalgia of old characters is a common theme in bad ends to shows and Weeds didn't disappoint, bring back Dean and Guillermo and Sanjay amongst many others who have been absent from the story for years. This was justified by making them part of Nancy's legal weed distribution company. It is a nice notion, but these characters were bid farewell years ago. The lack of conflict was just glaring. There was a need to get the main characters to a place where we could say goodbye to them in a place where their lives would go on in an acceptable way. This, of course, is what you want to do at the end of a series. But instead of creating an arch that would get the Botwins where they need to be, it was done simply by sending Nancy walking around a Bar Mitzvah talking to her family while they showed her they were happy or, in Shane's case, ready to change. I almost hate to advocate for another season of Weeds, but it would have been worth it to let relationships develop to where we cared about their individual moments with Nancy, rather than basing them on what we know from the past. Not to mention Shane's secret of being a killer is revealed to other characters with nothing more than a shrug of a response. I can't imagine that that is what viewers were hoping the response to that reveal would be. As far as Doug's conclusion goes, it was a mess. The notion of Doug reconnecting with his son, who he kicked out of his house when he was a teenager for being gay, could have been a very moving occasion in the hands of writers more equipped to deal with that relationship (see Ryan Murphy and the Hummel relationship). But in this instance it was just a total miss. Doug was his usual ridiculous self, which in most cases is perfect, but in this case just made for a meaningless scene with a character we said goodbye to eight years ago that we still ended up not caring about. The best scene featuring Josh Wilson was the interaction between he and Nancy where they just sort of bullshit about life and how he managed to turn out OK. The father son scenes were just not meaningful. As I said earlier, it hit all the right points, they just didn't seem to matter as they were presented.
It is not to say that Weeds was incapable of creating a great series finale. The argument could be made that they had already done it twice. The burning of Agrestic, and all that Nancy had built as her drug empire and her relationships within that world (Conrad and Heylia), was a perfect end to the story the show had been telling up to that point. The end of the sixth season, when Nancy turns herself in and admits to the murder of her husband Esteban Reyes, was an emotionally stirring end that showed her finally realizing that what she needed to do was give in to the hole she'd dug herself (a mile deep and a foot wide) and sacrifice herself for her families well being by answering for all of the wrong she had done and hell she had created. But when it came to the actual end, the show just didn't get hardly anything right. Sure the characters came a place they needed to be from the start, but it was a place gotten to in way that was hard to care about. It is hard to ever fault shows for staying around too long, after all, who wouldn't continue with a thing that is both lucrative and desired. But in the end Weeds best days were behind them. And saying goodbye to those little boxes was not as hard as it should have been.
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