Summer TV Review: Sorting Through the (6th Season of) Weeds

It's been a long while since I did a TV review, and after watching last night's third episode of Season 6 of Weeds, "A Yippity Sippity", I felt it was time to start back on this road once again. Weeds is a show that I've been considering dropping from the rotation from a while and so far Season 6 hasn't really done much to sway my opinion. It seems that every since Weeds and the Botwins left Agrestic at the end of Season 3--and they did away with the amazingly entertaining "Little Boxes" intros sung by everyone from Elvis Costello, Regina Spektor and Randy Newman (which happens to be Andy's name this season) to The Shins, The Decemberists and Linkin Park--the show's plot has been moving in no apparent direction as the Botwin's do the same.

Even Nancy Botwin seems bored by Weeds (Showtime)

The best part of the show used to be Mary-Louise Parker  but the Nancy Botwin character has been so static and unchanged for so long, she isn't all that fun anymore (though it's still worth a read of the odd Variety interview Parker just did). Her total disregard for her parental responsibilities and her unwavering attitude against leading a straight life have moved her from an intriguing character to downright frustrating. This is a dark show, but this season has been especially dark and unnecessarily so at times (like Silas being paid to read choose-your-own-adventures to the dad on Clarissa Explains It All sans clothes on). And in the end, despite everything that made their lives a living hell, Nancy and the Botwins still return to dealing pot. In some ways, Nancy as the dealer is the biggest addict of them all. She is willing to put her family at risk so many times to get her dealing "fix" and to satisfy her own personal needs that she went from an extremely sympathetic character looking to get her family through the loss of their father to a selfish woman incapable of seeing how she is ruining her children. Even her rant in the past episode of how her kids would have had to go to a worse school and live in a worse house if she didn't deal drugs (and instead worked at the Gap) was so shallow and materialistic that it made me question whether any of the past 5 seasons were even necessary.

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Summer TV Review: The Second Level of Mad Men

Sometimes we mix our pleasure with pain and it seems like Don Draper takes the same approach with a prostitute in the season premiere of Mad Men. With a cadre of flawed characters, Mad Men has always let us live with an uneasy relationship where we like unlikable characters and dislike those we would normally become sympathetic to in the real world. Take Don or Roger Sterling--lovable womanizers--and I'll take them any day over Betty Draper or Peggy Olson--beat down women not worthy of sympathy. It made me queasy even writing that last sentence but that foreign place that Mad Men makes us sit (even more foreign to many of us than 1964). But while most of the show has been a back-and-forth struggle between Don Draper and his work-home life, "Public Relations", the season premiere of Mad Men, seems to be pushing the show onto another level. Bert Cooper may "refuse to be any part of that charade" (one of the best lines from the first episode), but I'm ready an excited for what's in store for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (or SCDP as they are now known) this season on Mad Men.

Don debates who he really is during the Season 4 premiere (AMC)

We've spent the better part of three seasons trying to answer our opening question: "who is Don Draper?" The answer that we have received so far has been pretty consistent, a self-assured man hell-bent on keeping his personal life under wraps and surviving in a fast-changing world--while trying to keep up the airs that his personal life is A-O-K. Is it any wonder that Don felt somewhat uneasy by the questioning of the one-legged man from Ad Age (like Jack Hammond, Draper was also in Korea--and he too came back with something false) as it delved into Don's personal life and his marriage? It's no wonder that Don seemed to be more at ease by the end of the episode in his interview with the Wall Street Journal talking about the "scrappy upstart" as SCDP instead of Don Draper.

The problem may be that Don Draper is in full-on identity crisis. His wife is with another man tending to his own kids in the house he technically owns. His dating life is different now that he's a divorcee and bachelor instead of a married philanderer (and now that it's 1964). His office* and job responsibilities are new and different. While last season he was dealing with Hilton, this season he's dealing with a "two-piece" bathing suit company that doesn't want to be raunchy. Don's still a brilliant ad man, but he's also a hypercritical boss (and more about this later) who doesn't really know how to relate to people. While everyone (including the aforementioned prostitute) has plans on Thanksgiving, Don is left by himself in his bachelor pad in the Village (reminding me a lot of the 30 Rock Valentine's Day episode). He's a lonely soul who doesn't want to eat what the housekeeper makes for him and seems to only sleep at the office.

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Summer TV Review: Entourage Lacking Its Ammo

When Ari Gold's son showed up at breakfast with a water pistol, Ari said to his son, "Jews don't carry guns buddy, you know that." That was the closest that Entourage has come to show any bullets this season. I wanted to go through and do reviews for my summer shows (Entourage, Dexter, Mad Men, Weeds, Californication, Eastbound and Down, etc.), but Entourage is slowly inching towards moving off my summer watching list all together. The show has gone from being a fun (and funny) look at a boy's club in Los Angeles to being unimportant. Like an upper-middle class teenage girl moaning about her life problems because boys don't like her and her mom grounded her for her C- on her report card, the problems of the entourage are not as bad as they seem and they are the same issues that they dealt with a week ago--and it all comes off as whiny and,  mostly, unfunny. That's the worst part about the show right now: in an effort to "mature" as a show and as characters, the show has lost it's sprinkling of humor to the point where watching the show has become more of a routine than an enjoyable Sunday experience.

Maybe the issue is that I'm expecting too much from Entourage. As Steven Kurutz from the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday after the episode named "Dramedy":

We’ve been forced to confront something unpleasant since we began recapping “Entourage:” it’s not a very smart show. Perhaps on some level we always knew this but were sufficiently distracted by the male fantasy aspects: the beautiful, willing women; the free-wheeling lifestyle celebrated by Vince and his buddies; the fact that male friends can hang out together without requiring three weeks of advance scheduling.

Kurutz points out quite correctly that by making the characters grow apart and mature, "we’re left with slight plots that illuminate shallow lives." Not only do the characters seem bored by this (Vince doesn't seem all that excited to be having an awesome party at his place and Johnny finally seems to be getting his career off the ground but seems ambivalent towards it), but the writers and casting seem bored as well.

The celebrity cameos which were fun and cool in the first few seasons are now ingrained into the plot and too self-referential at times to be enjoyable. The celebrities they get dryly recite lines that are sometimes not even comprehensible (sorry A.P., you're a great running back, but that was you this past week). The only person who ever seems to make it work is Bob Saget*--but even his "dirty old man" bit has been overplayed (and I can watch him do his The Aristocrats bit multiple times so that says a lot). Entourage must have ran out of celebrities for walk on rolls so now their auctioning them off for us regular folk. They bring on new talent who can't act (Dania Ramirez as Turtle's former employee Alex is an awful actress). The stars on the show even seem so bored that they're investing in Albany restaurants to keep their lives occupied. 

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