In Which Mary-Louise Parker Elevates Herself Slightly Over a Marine Organism and Also Probably Owen Wilson

 

Weeds, Season 3

We are not even halfway through Weeds’ third season, and while much of it hasn’t been particularly sharp, or funny, or dramatic, there’s reason to hope it can be better.

Mary-Louise Parker’s character has been used so recklessly that at this point in every episode she finds herself having to take off her clothes. Her relationship with a black dude was the source of most of the humor in the first episode of the show, which we would offer to you if you promised not to deplete our bandwidth all at once.

I can’t bring myself to get Showtime, I’m going to cancel HBO tomorrow, the only real consequence of which I will have to procure Curb Your Enthusiasm another way.

Eventually this pricing model will become outdated. I would be more than willing to pay a fee for exactly the number of channels I want to watch, but this is death for cable providers. When content providers start licensing their own content directly to you instead of working through the corrupt cable industry, we’ll be way better off. By not getting their shit together, they make it easier to buy from them as opposed to using torrents or LimeWire or some other thing.

This is the main reason why intellectual property law is so retarded. We’d be better off entirely without it.

“Little Boxes” — Death Cab for Cutie (mp3)

 

The youngest kid on the show continues to be the most compelling character. He looks like MLP’s dead husband. They covered the dead husband in Season 1 so he’s not getting a lot of screen time. In hindsight they should have put him in Alaska or something and brought him back for sweeps.

Bringing aboard Matthew Modine as Elizabeth Perkins’ new love interest is a casting ploy that sounds better than it really is. Modine is terrible as a slimeball Christian suburban planner, but fortunately the guest wattage is about to rise when Mary-Kate hits the show as a Christian pothead.

Jenji Kohan, creator of the show

Interview with Jenji:

Elizabeth Perkins is still having the time of her life, but it’s hard to root for her and the show is asking you to at this point.

Otherwise, Perkins is the picture of health, and to prove it, last year she posed in the buff for “Allure” magazine. “I said, ‘Wow, nobody ever asked me to do that before.’ I thought, ‘This may be the only time you ever have the chance to take off your clothes and let somebody take your picture.’

Perkins was born in Queens, New York, but grew up on her grandfather’s farm on the border of Vermont and Massachusetts. A teenage loner, she “traveled with the wrong pack of kids. I could have gone down a very unproductive path,” she says. Instead, she immersed herself in acting after wandering into a theater on a local fairground. “I saw the actors up on the stage and said to myself, ‘These are my people.’ I felt like I was home.”

I could barely recognize Carrie Fisher in her guest spot.

“Shady Lane” — Pavement (mp3)

“Pueblo” — Pavement (mp3)

“Range Life” — Pavement (mp3)

“Spit on a Stranger” — Pavement (mp3) 

The emotional heart of the show is depleted, the stereotypical black mama character is about as consistent as Locke in Lost, and the tokenism surrounding their maid, Lupita, is downright noxious.  

It’s Mary-Louise herself who must carry this cast of characters, and since she’s killed two husbands simply by sipping on iced coffee a lot isn’t charming. Kevin Nealon’s performance has descended into self-parody, and Perkins’ plus-sized daughter is past her Huskaroos days and went into what we call the Big and Tall Summer.

Parker’s better suited for the theatre–she’s totally mugging through every scene. At the end of the first episode she found herself literally underwater, a joke better suited to Home Improvement.

Not to digress, but Home Improvement  was actually a very interesting show. As a cultural mover and shaker it’s going to be ranked well short of Seinfeld, but it wasn’t a bad show at all and perpetuated all kinds of great cultural values. I think Seinfeld gave us so much of our humor. Home Improvement may have helped at least 30,000 midwestern children be better parented by their fathers, when those parents saw it was cool to be manly and also kind of gay. I mean, does anyone remember Tim Allen’s car on that show? I think all fathers were like Red on That 70s show until then.

That’s all I got.

Alex Carnevale was the JTT of his time.

“The Mighty Midshipman” — Centro-matic (mp3)

“Biology Tricks” — Centro-matic (mp3)

“Celebrated Grime” — Centro-matic (mp3)

Highly Recommended.

“Strahan Has Corralled The Freaks” — Centro-matic (mp3) 

Centro-matic myspace

Fort Recovery review

“Flashes and Cables” — Centro-matic (mp3)

 Centro-matic website

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Molly felt up a manatee cat. 

Danish entered the celebrity phase of his music career by settling his feud with ‘Ye.

Friday Owen Wilson Links were the cherry on top.