I powered through the entirety of this (third) season of ‘Weeds’ yesterday quite by accident, just because I was so into it that the end of each episode dragged me right into the next. This is the first review I’m writing relating to it (I’ve been off AllConsuming for a while, is all), but I’ve really been loving this show. Despite their foibles I like most of the characters: even the meanest bitch is driven by vulnerabilities she’s also a victim to. Dialogue-wise, I’m continually struck by how astoundingly good the writing is: whip-smart and snappy and you don’t want to miss a word of it. The theme whereby the suburbs are criticised as just as full of crime and corruption and unrespectable behaviour as the inner city areas the suburbs were originally created for nice white families to escape from, continues to turn up great dialogue and even a few lessons on racism and classism and the need to define yourself as something, anything, by imagining others as that much more different than they really are—though the show is never didactic. It simply doesn’t need to be: the heights of absurdity are so dizzying and hilarious, the audience so identified via the portrayals of characters always revealing themselves to be more complex, the storyline comprising such an established and entertaining clusterfuck that with every move someone makes you’re wondering what’s going to go wrong next, that despite the utter utter ridiculousness of it all, for 25 minutes it’s a pretty convincing reality, and one in which listening to its characters different perspectives is just a prerequisite for more laughs. Great music, too.