Weeds across the world

The first season of Weeds, a Showtime original series now in it’s third season, was categorically unspectacular: the premise was decent, the cast was varied, the characters slightly were contrived, the plot partially engaging. I remember watching those first episodes with my ex-girlfriend during that eternally bright and sunny and lackadaisical period of college between freshman year and senior year, which now seems eternally distant and for the most part a gap in the space-time continuum. Of course we would smoke a bowl before watching, and, I believe it was Mondays at ten, actively veg out with nothing to anticipate anytime in the immediate future but paper deadlines and parties with all the same people.

I watched the second season of Weeds, in which almost every episode was a nail biter and the show became a weekly must, in Palm Desert, CA. My college roommate and I, recently graduated, were living in his parents’ vacation home while we edited our movie about drive-in movie theatres, which we had recently spent two months on the road filming. We would work all day, starting around one pm and finishing around ten or eleven, after which with nothing, and I mean NOTHING, better to do we would smoke a bowl and watch the new episodes at the same time but separately on our individual computers, wearing headphones. When you spend every waking hour with someone for months the small pleasures like watching TV with them lose their appeal. Monday nights were big for us in those days when I sometimes wouldn’t leave the house for an entire week except to ride my bike around the abandoned (it’s too hot to live in Palm Desert during the summer) gated community and watch the sprinklers bring the golf course back to life in anticipation of the fall retreat and wealthy middle-aged vacation home people.

Well now it’s season three of Weeds and I’ve seen the first four episodes, with my initial reaction being that they fall somewhere between season one and three in quality. Even though the intensity is there it seems a bit forced, still feeding off the season 2 finale perhaps, and the plot is dragging and diverging. But I have faith that it’s all part of the master plan because it’s good to have faith in certain things like that. And for this season I’m in India. I’ve been downloading the episodes at work and watching them holed-up at home alone, unfortunately without herbal enhancement. Not yet confident enough to deal with the heat and the cows and the post-apocalyptic chaos which apparently has ancient roots and underlying harmony and could one day save the world, suburban Orange Country and planned communities resonate well inside my head, not to mention remind me why I’m over here. One giant leap across the world; one-hundred baby steps to the local shop, and one-hundred more after that, and pretty much every one-hundred baby steps there’s a small shop with a Wal-Mart somehow crammed inside of it. And I’ve got big plans to hop in one of the ubiquitous auto rickshaws tomorrow and bargain the price down to less than half and venture out of this neighborhood into the city of 8+ million.

But tonight I’m wondering about season 4 of Weeds, assuming season three doesn’t bomb and the show gets cancelled, and what I’ll associate it with, like the first time I heard Pavement or the first Lord of the Rings movie I saw, where I remember more the where and when than the what. Not to mention the how or the why, which are what I get to think about in the meantime I guess. So stay tuned…