Since January, I’ve been working my way through all 8 seasons of Weeds, which was Breaking Bad before Breaking Bad was Breaking Bad. I started watching Weeds, back when it was first on, but then it either switched channels or I lost interest or something. Anyway, in this fallow period between unmissable TV seasons, I’ve been watching between two and four episodes a night.

If you don’t know it, the concept of this show is as follows: suburban widow turns to drug dealing in order to maintain her lifestyle. So it has baked into it, as it were, the blinkered, selfish entitlement of white middle class America, meaning that Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) is not a terribly sympathetic character. She could have moved to a less prosperous neighbourhood and got a job. Instead, as the series progresses, she becomes something of a nightmare, manipulative, inconsiderate, and treacherous. A lot of the online chatter about the show concerns this difficulty, with a lot of people claiming that the reason they stopped watching was because the character of Nancy annoyed them or made them angry.

I can see that. I also wondered, as I started to watch, how much of this irritation was because Nancy is a woman whereas her male counterpart as an anti-hero Walter White (Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad), is given much more leeway by that show’s fans.

Well, it’s a head scratcher. I found Weeds watchable to the end, notwithstanding Nancy, but I might have stopped watching (or at least paused it) without compunction if Westworld season 2 had come on.

It was a show that didn’t go in for much realism. Nancy’s existence, with no visible means of support for long stretches of time, is hard to credit, and the writers revelled in creating preposterous, jaw-dropping situations, such as the one in the final season, when Nancy has sex with someone on the very spot that her first husband dropped dead. As a weed dealer, she was really a failure, getting ripped off over and over again, and constantly encountering supposedly ruthless gangsters who somehow failed to kill her. The most problematic aspect of the show was probably the way that Nancy neutralised these male threats by sleeping with them, or sleeping with someone else who then did the neutralising. I can see a lot of people switching off for that reason alone. At the same time, the masochistic self-loathing that such behaviour represents was true to character.

Most of all, Weeds wanted to foreground its status as a premium cable show all the time, with frequent nudity, mucho swearing, toilet humour, and some very squirmy sexual situations, which sometimes got in the way of the narrative drive and became tiresome. On the other hand, one of the pleasures of the show was the supporting cast and array of special guest stars, including Martin Donovan, Albert Brooks, Carrie Fisher, Alanis Morrisette, Matthew Modine, Julie Bowen, Richard Dreyfuss, Elizabeth Perkins and Jennifer Jason Leigh. In fact, you never quite know who’s going to show up to do a foul-mouthed turn.

The final two episodes manage to tie up most of the storylines, though a number of guest stars do disappear without further mention (Elizabeth Perkins, for example, who was a major character until she wasn’t). As a long-running series finale, it actually works quite well, with its science-fictional flash forward and refusal to get too sentimental. If this review had a star rating, it would be three. Anyway: it’s all on Netflix, so knock yourself out.