Weeds, Season 4

For its fourth season, the Showtime comedy-drama Weeds shook things up. At the end of last season, the suburban California town of Agrestic, the setting of the show for three years, went up in flames. Pot dealer Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), under investigation by the DEA, soaked her house in gasoline and hit the road.

She ends up in a beach town near San Diego called Ren Mar, setting up house in her dead husband's grandmother's house. She finds the "Bubbie" is on life support, tended to by her garrulous father-in-law (Albert Brooks). The show then takes some humorous twists to get some of the other characters from the show down there, namely Nancy's frenemy, Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) and her accountant and best customer, Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon).

These changes are welcome, as the third season was just getting too bizarre. This season has its unbelievability, but it was more grounded, and finally Nancy faces her essential flaw--she's addicted to danger, and has ignored her children in the pursuit of her illicit business.

The arc of the season has Nancy working for a drug smuggler (Guillermo Diaz), who gives her a job as a manager of a maternity store near the border. It turns out that a tunnel has been dug between that store and Tijuana. Eventually she meets the big boss (Demian Bechir), who also happens to be the mayor of Tijuana. The two begin a sexual relationship.

Celia, beginning the season in jail, taking the rap for Nancy, eventually gets out and joins Nancy at the store. She becomes addicted to drugs and goes into rehab. Nancy's brother-in-law, the man-child Andy (Justin Kirk), starts a coyote business with Doug, wanting to be "gentler, kinder" movers of illegal immigrants. The show takes the attitude that there is nothing wrong with people entering the country illegally, and sends up deliciously the "minutemen" who guard the border, with an unrecognizable Lee Majors playing one such character.

Meanwhile, Nancy's sons, Silas (Hunter Parrish) and Shane (Alexander Gould) basically raise themselves. Silas enters a relationship with an older woman (Julie Bowen) while Shane starts a new school and gets a reputation as a bad-ass, earning him the admiration of girls who wear lip-rings.

At the end of the season, Nancy faces that she has been rationalizing her behavior (Hello!), especially when the tunnel starts being used for human trafficking. Of course there is a cliff hanger.

The balance between humor and danger is the best part of this show, as it is funny (an episode requiring the characters to sit Shiva for the dead grandmother is mordantly amusing) but there is violence lurking around the corner. One character has his skin removed with a belt sander. And I kind of feel bad for Latino actors. It seems they also have to play either drug kingpins or illegals. I guess as long as they get paid, they don't care.