Weeds(Season Three): Showtime

"In its second season, "Weeds" became one of the best plotted shows on TV, routinely ending episodes on cliffhangers that TV’s best dramas should envy. That continues this season, even though there’s an unwelcome hint of season one’s depressing ennui as trouble hangs over Nancy for an extended period." - (Pittsburgh Post Gazette)   "It is a great time to jump in on "Weeds" creator Jenji Kohan’s singular comedy/drama, with its fine eye for the humanity (and absurdity) in everyone, from cop to thug to city councilman to wayward kid. Every character bursts with life here, in what may be the most fully realized show on TV." - (Newsday)   " "Weeds" still isn’t quite funny or startling enough to become a compulsion but delivers enough tantalizing hits to merit the TiVo "season pass" treatment…Parker has already earned a Golden Globe for the show, which, under pay TV’s formula, is the sort of prestige that temporarily renders ratings semi-moot. And if "Weeds" doesn’t deliver belly laughs, to say it’s moderately addictive isn’t just blowing smoke." - (Variety)    " "Weeds" has never derived its subversion from the mere obvious matter of its setup: a widowed mother, Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), starts selling drugs to keep her family from falling out of affluence in a fictional Los Angeles suburb. It thrives as radical comedy because it challenges one of our most preciously held assumptions: that parenthood is ennobling, rewarding work; that it grounds us and makes us marginally better people. Even “The Sopranos” didn’t dare to do that….[At its debut] “Weeds” hardly made narcotics culture seem all that scary or pernicious, refusing to equate the use or sale of drugs with any kind of moral failing. And it gave us Andy Botwin, played by the gifted Justin Kirk, as the embodiment of failure and apathy’s unique seductiveness. But “Weeds” has become something more Didion-esque, a quiet indictment of haplessness and poor discipline, both personal and parental." - (New York Times)

Compiled by Sarah Outhwaite and Bryon Rudd