Favorite Things & Comic Pairings: Weeds

Like a lot of writers, I spend a certain amount of my time slagging actors. It's what we do. From the moment you first run into someone who's been hired for a role, and they start talking about "how their character wouldn't..." -- a character you've lived with for eight months, and they've lived with for ten minutes -- well, the craw, the gorge, the bile.

But I'm also sanguine with the compact. The compact is this: good actors make you look good. If you can keep them from metastasizing into monsters, the good actors can help you. They can lift your words, and find laughs where there weren't any. And though the public at large will credit them with everything and you with nothing, among your bitter, small coterie of admirers, they can make your stock go up. Truth.

I got thinking about this because of Weeds. I've read the stories over the past few months, about the battles between creator Jenji Kohan and famously-difficult and prickly star Mary Louise Parker. It sounds tense. And unpleasant.

And sadly, I do not care.

In its second season, Weeds has become something so much sharper, weirder, and funnier than what it was in its first season. There are still moments of quiet, still drama, but overall the comic tone is what sells it for me - and the darkness of that comic tone.

Weeds has always had a propensity to "go there." But in season two, they've gone places that I just can't believe. The Uncle taking the 12 year old to the massage parlor was bad enough, as was the masturbation speech. But in the episode I just watched, there is the single funniest sex scene I have ever seen on film. Seriously. I will never forget or think about the phrase "Don't forget to breathe," ever again.

One of the strongest selling points for me is Justin Kirk. It is simply inconceivable to me that this is the same guy who played Prior in Angels in America. He is so effortlessly funny in Weeds that from the moment he showed up, it became a different show.

Like in a lot of good comedy, the strongest scenes in Weeds come from the comic pairings. Justin Kirk now has Meital Dohan as a very horny rabbinical advisor. But before that, his rapport with the kid playing Shane, Alexander Gould, was already a thing to behold. Now it looks like Gould is going to get his own comic pairing, with Eden Sher, a young actress who was one of the shining things about Fred Goss's late and lamented (by me, anyway) Sons & Daughters.

There are other pairings that work in Weeds: Elizabeth Perkins and Kevin Nealon (who knew?) And Elizabeth Perkins and Allie Grant playing the most dysfunctional mother- daughter duo since Joan Crawford went after the coat hangers.

These comic pairings, when actors spark like that, are things that you just can't predict, and why writers who talk inflexibly about their work and their words are never the ones that I want to work with. The joy of discovering people who are fun to write for is one of the great surprises and opportunities of this business. The biggest flaw in the Canadian system is the way that development forces five, six, seven scripts to be written all at once before actors are involved -- because you lose the dynamic and clarifying force of actor chemistry.

There are actors on Weeds who aren't really funny at all. Mary Louise Parker, for one, who was so funny on West Wing, probably shows her feud with Kohan the strongest by being perpetually on the drama tip this season. (She's still the anchor of the show...but she's not funny.) The older son, Silas, (Hunter Parrish) isn't funny. Perkins and Parker got one funny scene together a couple of episodes ago. But it was more shocking and weird than funny. It worked because it played as drama.

Casting only gets you to the starting blocks, even if it's cast well. A movie is cast for vision. A TV series is cast for possibility.

Your bible may be neatly typed and a hundred pages. But this bitch is collaborative, G. You have to know when to throw it out. And you network types? You have to recognize when to let us do that.

Don't forget to breathe.