Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Weeds: Season Seven Blu-ray Movie Review

High and still relatively mighty.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 7, 2012

That famous ad with the egg and the portentous narrator declaiming, “This is your brain. . .This is your brain on drugs” seemed to suggest that even dabbling with illicit substances would wreak havoc with the user’s cerebral cortex and higher intellectual functions, leaving things. . .well, scrambled. That certainly hasn’t been the case with the Botwin family, whose seven year trek through the wild and wacky world of marijuana dealing has been documented in Weeds, one of Showtime’s signature series. While the Botwins frequently (in fact, usually) do incredibly stupid things, they almost always do them with clever little bons mots at the veritable tips of their tongues, essaying a sort of hyper-verbal reality that is distinctly at odds with most people’s experiences with ultra-laid back stoners who can more often than not barely utter a word in their catatonic buzzed trance states. Weeds has been a really fun series for almost all of its run, despite its penchant for family dysfunction and frequent melodrama wrapped up in a sort of cheeky wry humor that offers people talking and acting like very few real folks, stoned out of their minds or otherwise, ever do. Weeds offers a sort of heightened reality that may not exactly accurately reflect the world of the stoner, or perhaps more relevantly the dealer, but which in its own weird little way, is frequently sardonically amusing when taken with a large dose of salt and/or THC. Highlighted by a winning performance by Mary Louise Parker as matriarch and über-dealer Nancy Botwin, Weeds doesn’t exactly break any new ground in its seventh season, but it continues to ply the waters of a family in disarray, focusing for the most part on the up and down roller coaster ride between Nancy and her older son Silas (Hunter Parrish). Silas’ increasing quasi-Oedipus complex has him both emulating and competing with his mother, leading to the season’s climactic build up and yet another cliffhanger ending. It may be same old, same old for longtime Weeds fans, but the fact remains that the series is almost inerrantly good natured and manages to overcome some of its seemingly built in fault lines.

As has happened over and over again on Weeds, the walls were closing in on Nancy Botwin as the sixth season drew to a close. A life on the lam had finally caught up with the fugitive dealer, and with assorted bad guys out to teach her a lesson, the sixth season wrapped up with Nancy giving herself up to police to avoid an even worse fate. The seventh season of Weeds cheats a little bit, at least for longtime fans who might have wanted to get into the nitty gritty of “what came next,” by skipping forward three years. The first scene of the seventh season is in fact a parole hearing for Nancy, one which, in typical Weeds fashion, quickly devolves into a feud between various (unseen) members of the parole board about things completely unrelated to Nancy’s proposed parole, even while Nancy herself is flummoxed that her supposed deal to enter into Witness Protection is being summarily ignored.

That sets up the next several episodes, where Nancy finds herself ensconced in a New York city halfway house run by a Johnnie Cochran wannabe who goes around spouting the house rules in rhyming couplets which aren’t exactly the stuff of Shakespeare (or even Cochran, as a matter of fact). Nancy’s scheming sister Jill (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wastes no time in telling Nancy’s family, which has escaped to Copenhagen, which of course leads them to return to New York to reunite, much to Nancy’s chagrin. In the meantime, Nancy has traded some stolen explosives which her former cellmate gave to her (more or less, anyway) for a new “supply,” even as she attempts to live by the rhyming rules of the halfway house.

The rest of the season has a number of intersection subplots. Nancy’s son Silas, who has established himself as a model in Copenhagen, attempts to get a modeling career underway in New York, to middling success, which falls by the wayside when the “family business” proves more instantly lucrative. A series of miscommunications, another Botwin standby, leads to Nancy and Silas ending up as competitors by the season’s last few episodes. Playing out against this plot arc is the wheeling and dealing Nancy does to regain custody of her youngest son, Stevie, who is in the somewhat grasping hands of Jill. Jill of course wants to do everything in her power to deny Nancy custody, and not for entirely altruistic motives. The sibling rivalry between Jill and Nancy reaches epic proportions by the end of the season, with repeated epithets of “bug eyes” (Jill to Nancy) and “mustache” (Nancy to Jill) being thrown like some sort of mantra.

Weeds is one of those shows that manages to be fairly consistently entertaining and amusing despite its tendency to traverse territory it’s already gone over many times previously. At this point, some seven seasons in, finding Nancy escaping the gaping jaws of disaster only to reinvent herself as a success story has become more than a bit passé, and even this season’s sort of Sex and the City big business setting can’t completely offset the overweening feeling of déjà vu. That said, the series is still awfully funny in its own dry way quite a bit of the time, and Parker is as winsomely appealing as ever. The melodrama between Nancy and Silas in the final half of the season gets to be a bit cloying at times, and is resolved much too conveniently to be convincing, but by that time, we’re faced with another supposed tragedy as the season comes to its expected cliffhanger ending, a tragedy which will no doubt be resolved handily as the eighth season begins.

Weeds: Season Seven Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Weeds Season Seven is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films and Showtime with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. In terms of niche cable television series, Weeds may never quite climb to the top of the heap, but it offers a consistently sharp and appealing image that looks especially nice in this New York City set season. The series tends to be just a tad soft in its interior, dimly lit, sequences, where shadow detail becomes somewhat murky, but a lot of the exterior sequences in this season pop quite nicely. Fine detail is quite appealing in the series' ubiquitous close-ups and the image is generally very sharp and precise looking.

Weeds: Season Seven Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As I mentioned in my review of Weeds: Season Six, few would think of a series like Weeds as needing a DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 (yes, 7.1) mix, but that's what's here, needed or not. The 7.1 mix may in fact be a bit of overkill, especially considering the series' rather small scale sonic ambitions, ones which play out typically in smaller dialogue moments that typically feature just two or three characters at a time. The soundtrack really comes alive, and in fact nicely utilizes the surrounds, in some ambient environmental effects as well as the series' continued use of well chosen source cues. Fidelity is expectedly excellent, with some surprising dynamic range (get ready for the last sound effect of the season, which is startling, to say the least).

Weeds: Season Seven Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentaries feature the following participants:
  Bags: Jenji Kohan
  From Trauma Cometh Something: Gary Anthony Williams and Michael Trim
  Object Impermanence: Justin Kirk
  Vehement v. Vigorous: Kevin Nealon
  Une Mère que J'aimerais Baiser: Roberto Benabib and Matthew Salberg
  Do Her/Don't Do Her: Jenji Kohan


• Gag Reel (HD; 2:25)


• Guru Andy's Tricks of the Trade (HD; 8:37) starts with a silly animated prologue and then cuts to a montage of "Andy moments," replete with tips for success.


• Puff Puff Pass (HD; 8:01) features Gary Anthony Williams hosting a faux web chat with Justin Kirk and Kevin Nealon.


• Growing Up in the Weeds with Alexander Gould (HD; 9:21) profiles younger actor Alexander Gould, looking back on his work through the years on the series.


• Deleted Scenes (HD; 6:25)


• Multi-Screen Comparison (HD; 4:30) presents a test done by the crew in preparation for a multi-screen sequence which opens the "Qualitative Spatial Reasoning" episode, which is followed by that sequence from the finished episode.

Weeds: Season Seven Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Weeds: Season Seven is actually a good deal better than it has any right to be. The series has traveled down this road several times before, and there's really nothing much new here, and yet the series still manages to be fun and frequently very entertaining. The cast is a fine tuned machine at this point in the series, which perfectly pitched performances, and the writing still offers the same wry sensibility that made the series a hit seven years ago. With the usual good array of supplements, and excellent video and audio, Weeds: Season Seven is Recommended.