Other Pittsburgh Entertainment News: August 2007 Archives

By Barbara Vancheri, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Greg Mottola, the director of the superhot "Superbad," is returning to Pittsburgh to make a comedy he wrote called "Adventureland."

By Barbara Vancheri, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Greg Mottola, the director of the superhot "Superbad," is returning to Pittsburgh to make a comedy called "Adventureland." Production is scheduled to start in October.

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.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07222/808295-237.stm

By Ramesh Santanam, Associated Press Writer

Maybe it's this former steel town's blue-collar traditions. Or its down-to-earth reputation. Or its many connections to the entertainment industry.