In the Weeds
How Celia Hodes Converted Me into a TV Completist
I have given up on very few television shows. I can name them all for you, if you’d like: Pretty Little Liars, The Riches, My Name is Earl, and Desperate Housewives. This list is significantly shorter than the list of TV shows I have finished; and this is in no way my attempt at bragging — it’s just that once something holds my interest, I won’t stop until I see it through to the end.
My life as a TV completist began when I was 17 and magically stumbled upon the beta of Netflix’s streaming services, then called “Netflix on Demand.” Because I have two younger sisters, most of the TV I watched at that point consisted of family-friendly shows like Drake and Josh and Full House; often I would end up watching a lot more Disney Channel than I would have liked due to my parents’ restrictions on what TV their three girls could watch. I remember scrolling through Netflix, looking for a DVD to order, and coming across an image that was forever singed in my mind: Mary-Louise Parker in an adorable pin-up outfit, framed by the word Weeds behind her. I had the option to order the first season on DVD or watch the show right then on the computer. For the latter, I had no need to ask my parents for permission; I just had to click ‘play’.
The warning box announcing a TV-MA rating was never allowed to pop up in the top-left corner of our family’s TV, and I adapted to that family tradition by watching the show on the family desktop computer: just me, headphones, snacks, and my eyes glued to the sole source of light in the room while the rest of my family slept. There was an intimacy and secrecy about sitting in the dark of the late night watching a show that was just for me. It was the only point in my day that I was undisturbed and alone; I was simultaneously at peace and on edge, absorbed in the action but anxious that a sibling or parent might walk in on one of the show’s many graphic sex scenes — which could lead to shutting down my coveted clandestine operation. Now bear in mind that there were only a few shows to stream at this point in history, whereas today we have thousands of choices (not including all of the illegal websites that some people might use to watch Food Network’s Chopped: Canada or HBO’s Game of Thrones, just as totally random examples); perhaps it was the lack of options that instilled in me an intense desire to see the show’s culmination.
The show has an interesting enough premise: Nancy Botwin, a suburban mother of two boys, Silas and Shane, turns to selling marijuana in light of her husband’s recent death. However, the beginning of Weeds, it must be admitted, is pretty bad. The characters are jaded without being magnetic; they’re rough, harsh, and very flawed. For three episodes, the show meanders through the fictional town of Agrestic California from one unhappy character to the next. Most of the time, the humorous moments don’t succeed in tempering the overall bleak depiction of suburbia. Then, with episode four of that first season (“Fashion of the Christ”), the show finds its groove, evoking the same feeling you get when a novel finally picks up and things really start to happen.
“Fashion of the Christ” begins by introducing one of the show’s most interesting characters: the petulant, immature, hilarious, loyal, and undeniably charming Andy Botwin — Nancy’s brother-in-law. Over the course of this single episode, he sells, from the back of a beat-up van, mustard-yellow T-shirts which say “Chris [sic] died for your Sins” above a stick figure drawing of the Crucifixion of Jesus (he’s Jewish; his customers are elementary school students); he IM-sexts Silas’s deaf girlfriend, Megan, while she thinks she is talking to Silas (she’s 16); and he gives a heartfelt speech to Nancy about helping her raise her boys, in a foretaste of the show’s larger dynamics. No matter how deep the trouble the ever-enigmatic Nancy Botwin lands herself in, Andy is always there to help her pick up the pieces.
That said, Weeds didn’t click for me with Andy’s colorful introduction or Jane Lynch’s guest lecture on being a responsible, exercising pot smoker, or Silas and Megan’s awkward and endearing navigation of adolescent love (they hold plastic cups filled with red wine and giggle over exchanging a sidekick phone in order to communicate). It clicked with the episode’s final scene, depicting a character I love to hate: Celia Hodes.
The background music intensifies; as the volume builds, we see Celia drawing over her reflection in the bathroom mirror with a dark burgundy shade of lipstick. The camera leaves Celia and begins cycling through a Donnie Darko-style montage showing Nancy, Andy, Silas, and Megan either sleeping or attempting to sleep. Then the music is interrupted by an airplane disturbing the peace of the manicured cesspool that is Agrestic. The sound of the plane drowns out the music, and the focus is placed on Celia again as her house shakes around her. Her expression is unchanged and she continues drawing on the mirror. The scene shifts to her husband Dean in their bed, startled awake by a shipment of Diet Coke bottles dropped by the plane, which crashes through their ceiling and into their bedroom. The soda bottles perforate the walls and are spewing their shaken contents all over the room. In the very first scene of the first episode, Nancy had pitched the idea of banning soft drinks to the PTA of her son’s middle school, and Celia — borderline-obsessed with her eleven year old daughter’s weight — had argued that the school should keep the diet sodas “for the girls who are watching their weight.” Now, Celia finally emerges from the bathroom, completely numb to the sticky irony ruining her tastefully decorated home, and says in her signature raspy drawl, “I have cancer.”
I get chills every time I watch it. My experience watching TV up until that point did not prepare me for an ending like that. There are no hints that Celia has cancer at any point in the episode, so her announcement absolutely surprises the viewer while also humanizing Celia, who often comes across as callous and cold. The final seconds of that episode convinced me to continue watching; it made me realize that there might be more to these characters’ stories than I had initially anticipated. Yet even more, there’s a cinematic quality to the scene that intensifies its effect. As viewers we expect something on the order of an earthquake but nevertheless we’re jolted by two simultaneous surprises: the coke bottles exploding just as Celia drops her own life-shattering news.
Even though I initially disliked Celia, I came to realize how useful she was in disrupting Nancy’s plans, thus spurring the drama that I loved in the show. She is cruel, manipulative, clingy, and crass — traits that make her unsympathetic. But the show reveals her life story in telling glimpses — how she was weighed and scrutinized by her own mother, which explains why she does the same to her daughter; how she discovers that her husband is cheating on her by watching him engage in explicit activates with the local tennis coach from a nanny cam; or how she is wrongfully blamed for stealing a massive electric cross that acts as a grow light for an illicit marijuana operation that sends her to jail — that leave me feeling a little bit sorry for her. By the time Elizabeth Perkins decided to leave the show in season five to pursue a role in an animated children’s film, I missed the strangely necessary energy Celia brought to the show. It’s weird to be able to pinpoint the moment you realize you want to tear through the rest of the episodes of a show, but that scene with Celia sent me flying through the rest of the first season at an alarming rate.
Weeds provided me with enough drama to be sucked in, enough humor and witty details to make me continue to watch, and enough tragedy and problematic characters to keep me thinking about it long after it ended. I grew to like the unsettling feeling the show gave me, as I lived with the complexities of the lives of all its carefully crafted characters: and there was something cathartic, too, as I pieced together details, tried to predict what would happen next, then reached some closure by seeing it through to the end.
Rewatching the first four episodes of the show now, I am struck by how revisiting a show I’ve already completed isn’t the same as diving into a whole new world for the first time. I wasn’t drawn to rewatch the whole of Weeds, but I did long to recapture the satisfaction I’d felt when I was hunkered down in my parents’ living room — when it was just me, the late night, and a riveting, unpredictable story unfolding before my eyes.
