Well, I had to go a couple of weeks without my beloved pay cable shows, but last night Weeds kicked back in (10 p.m., Showtime) , so the world is getting back to normal.
I also got a nice surprise from Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a half-hour import from England that follows. I expected Call Girl to be little more than a set-up for a plethora of star Billie Piper’s sex scenes — not altogether a bad thing — but instead I discovered an intriguing character study about a high-price whore with two discreet personae: call girl and regular girl.
Piper routinely breaks the third wall to tell her story. And the sex scenes are far less explicit than I expected. In the first episode, Piper does not so much as shed her top. (Although she does ride on the back of a horse-loving john with a small saddle).
The first episode of Weeds finds Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) and her clan on the lam, landing in a beach town where her late husband Judah’s grandmother lived. As it turns out, Grandma is shriveling away, comatose in a bed in her living room. In walks Judah’s (and brother Andy’s) father — played by Albert Brooks in a hilariously snarky turn. (He can’t stand Nancy, essentially because she’s a gentile.
Nancy has not been chastened by the infernal disaster of last season, and plans to start over in the drug trade along the Mexican border.
If anything, Weeds looks like it might be even better this season.
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.