Weeds - Season Three [Blu-ray]
Weeds - Season Three [Blu-ray]
Weeds: Season Three continues the dark line of comedy that emerged in the previous season for this Showtime series. The story picks up exactly where it left off, with Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) faced with a half-dozen guns pointing at her in her own kitchen, while an Armenian gang and Nancy’s buyer, U-Turn (Page Kennedy), both demand she turn over her entire stash of marijuana (worth several hundred thousand dollars). Problem is, the pot is in the trunk of on-again, off-again friend Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), whose car has been stolen by Nancy’s oldest son, Silas (Hunter Parrish). Silas wants in on mom’s business, but his timing couldn’t be worse as Celia and a police officer show up to reclaim the car while Nancy is still at gunpoint. The fallout from all this is that Nancy ends up working for U-Turn to repay her debt to him, a dangerous relationship that sends Nancy down a rabbit hole of underworld threats and violence. Meanwhile, Celia gets booted out of her home by her husband and becomes estranged from her young daughter, Isabelle (Allie Grant), who insists she’s a lesbian. Celia rebounds a bit when a corrupt developer (Matthew Modine) gives her a house in exchange for her support on city council for one of his schemes. That goes wrong, too, when Celia allows Nancy, Doug (Kevin Nealon), and Conrad (Romany Malco), all of whom go into business after U-Turn stops being a problem, to put their endangered trove of marijuana plants in her house. Nancy’s other son, Shane (Alexander Gould), claims he can see and talk to the ghost of Nancy’s late husband, and Nancy’s brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk) goes AWOL from the U.S. Army after his comrade is deliberately killed in an experimental missile test. As always, it’s one thing after another on Weeds, and the blend of humor and suspense is uniquely compelling. Parker and the rest of the cast pull off some pretty surreal situations with great credibility. The show’s lead star, particularly, can carry moments of blended terror and comedy: one of the season’s most memorable moments finds Nancy forced to put on a sexy dance for a group of drug dealers in order to pick up a package U-Turn requires. The scene is humiliating, frightening, sexy, and comical all at once. Few actresses could have pulled it off, but Parker does. –Tom KeoghAmerica’s favorite pot-dealing soccer mom is more addictive than ever in the third season of WEEDS, the highly acclaimed Showtime(r) Original Series. Emmy (r) and Golden Globe(r) winner MARY-LOUISE PARKER stars as Nancy Botwin, a single mom who resorts to dealing pot after her husband dies suddenly. But when an off beat way to make ends meet grows into a mini-empire, the mother of all dealers finds she may be in over her head - and on the verge of taking everyone else with her. Hilarious and subversive, WEEDS is the hit that put the herb in suburb.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars I’m so Hooked!
Season 3 is Awesome. My husband and I enjoy this TV show so much. Each Character has such a unique part. We are so hooked. I preordered season 4 and can’t wait to get that one. I just hope this show goes many more seasons. You won’t be dissatisfied.
5 Stars ADDICITVE
I just love this series. It is so well written and the actors are one by one amazing. Can’t get enough of it!!!
5 Stars Weeds 3 is great — packaging stinks!
Weeds season 3 is great, however the packaging allows the discs to become loose and get jostled and scratched. I ordered Weeds season 3 twice from Amazon and both times the discs got loose in transit. They were very scratched and I had to return them both.
5 Stars Instant classic
This is one of my favorite shows of all time. It is an instant classic! Its edgy and innovative. I always think the show cannot possibly find its way out of the latest predicament, and it always does! Totally unpredictable. Set your TIVO’s for this one, and then buy the DVDs for you and everyone you know. Enjoy!
4 Stars Previously . . . on Weeds
In our last episode (of the 2nd season), Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) and her confreres were surrounded by gun-wielding competitors, a cliffhanger finale that demanded curious fans tune in for the solution. Weeds - Season Three [Blu-ray] picks up right smack in the middle of the nail-biting scenario, which was solved in a very believable way while setting the wheels in motion for events that follow. Along the way, there are a few more developments from other predicaments. Nancy seems on the verge of losing it at times, yet always survives with bedraggled grace and concessions to various foils here and there. The third season never got quite as dark as the previous season, and Nancy has grown more confident from all the scrapes she’s endured. She deals with things more directly, and lays it down more often on her own terms. On the less appealing side, sometimes the eccentricities of some of the other characters became a substitute for truly inventive writing, and seemed almost like a condescension to an audience the writers suspect might not notice the difference. But for the most part, it’s still a series with a lot of hooks that kept me looking forward to whatever came next. We watched the entire season in two days.
However, there are some things with which I was flatly displeased. The prime example is this business with her younger son Shane talking to a an invisible entity he claimed was his dead father. From the very first season, I never liked these touchy-feely segues with the kids, and this was the worst yet. Because the show tries at times too hard to be quirky, you have to allow that the writers just might go so far as to make it a real ghost. It then becomes annoying to ponder whether this bit of silliness will conclude as imaginary or not. Regardless of what it turns out to be, it’s such an absurd direction, it’s a distraction from what I watch this series for. It’s not even remotely believable that a boy his age would be enthralled to an overactive imagination to this degree; and it would be just plain stupid if he’s not and there’s an actual poltergeist about. Pick one, but neither works, as neither fits in with the rest of the series. It’s not the least bit interesting, and feels like filler. I can’t be the only one who’s thinking it.
Unlike the second season, there was no dire cliffhanger in the finale. It ties up nicely, with some intriguing possibilities dangling in front of Nancy, with no exigent circumstances attached. It feels complete and the show could have ended right there. However, there was in fact a fourth season, and it’s due out on DVD in June. From the clip I’ve seen, it appears that it’ll be even darker than the 2nd, with Nancy joining an established smuggling empire.
The Blu-ray transfer, as in the second season, suffers from the same flaws in that the palette gets too warm under particular lighting conditions. It tends to get too pink or too yellow in all but white light. Some facial details are lost behind the glare of the oversaturation. I’ve checked with Blu-ray review sites and they’ve noted the same thing. Why this series can’t get a great transfer that could be recommended on its own right is a mystery. But I can put that aside, because most of the time, it looks great, and the price was too good to pass up. When I ordered it, it was cheaper than the standard definition DVD.
It should be noted that the second disc operated peculiarly. Instead of returning to the episode list when an episode ended, the episdoe started over. Not a big deal, because all you had to do was access the menu manually. That wasn’t the case, however, when I tried to access an extra feature titled “Kush Kush and Away.” It wouldn’t play, and instead went through the entire loading cycle for the disc, returning to the main menu. Amazon exchanged it, but the replacement had the same error. So obviously there’s a defect through at least a batch of these discs, if not the whole line.
Among the other extras that DID work was a faux public access talk show called “Good Morning, Agrestic,” hosted by the series characters Dean Hodes (Andy Milder) and Pam (the goody-two-shoes busybody played by Becky Thyre), interviewing other characters from the series. During the interviews, issues from the series’ stories percolated into passive-aggressive asides and faux pas. Produced strictly as an extra feature for this disc, it was a goofy affair, having a video-taped deadness to it. It didn’t gel. Parker was conspicuously missing from the fun.
Justin Kirk (who plays Andy Botwin) gets a separate special feature titled “Uncle AWOL,” in which he acts the prima donna, encouraged by two lovely young sycophantic assistants. It, too, was just so-so. ___________________________________________________________________
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