Tuned In: 'Weeds' picks up where last season's cliffhangers left off

By Rob Owen, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

As season two of Showtime's "Weeds" ended, suburban pot-dealing widowed mom Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) was surrounded by thugs with guns, teenage son Silas (Hunter Parrish) had absconded with her stash and younger son Shane (Alexander Gould) was on a road trip to Pittsburgh, the promised land of family stability in his mind.

In the third season premiere (10 p.m. Monday), viewers rejoin all the show's cliffhangers right where they left off. By the end of the Aug. 20 episode, most of the dangling plots have been resolved, some only temporarily. By the fourth episode, new characters are introduced (Matthew Modine shows up, although still no sign of a character played by Mary-Kate Olsen) and new plots begin to develop, but series creator/writer Jenji Kohan needs the first three episodes to completely work her characters out of the corners she's painted them into.

Because there's so much ground to cover and so many characters to pull off assorted cliffs from which they hang, these early "Weeds" episodes are preoccupied with plot. There's some humor, but the comedy comes out more in later episodes once the tension dissipates.

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