“Weeds,” one of television’s most daring shows and America’s favorite pot dealers are back, now yours to own on DVD June 3rd. Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) is by no means a quintessential mom. To maintain her family’s upper middle class suburban lifestyle following the death of her husband, Nancy began pushing pot in the heavily medicated Californian suburb of Agrestic.
Season 3 finds Nancy with guns in her face as two different gangs are claiming the rights to her drugs as she learns that her second (and secret) husband, DEA agent Peter Scottson (Martin Donovan), has been murdered. The season follows Nancy as she tries to pay off a debt to the mean, drug dealing U-turn (Page Kennedy), begrudgingly allows her son Silas (Hunter Parrish) to deal, tries her luck with legitimate employment, and much, much more. Mary Kate Olsen guest stars this season as the God-loving Tara “Sunshine” Lindman, stealing Silas’ heart and bringing in the green selling to Agrestic and Majestic’s Bible crowd.
“Weeds: Season Three” DVD set is eco-friendly with packaging made from 100% recycled paper and water bottles and offers a plethora of wonderfully funny special features. There is the obligatory gag reel and episodes with commentary, featuring “Weeds” goddess/creator Jenji Kohan and actors Justin Kirk (Andy Botwin), Hunter Parrish and Alexander Gould (Shane Botwin), but there is so much more. Seven of the season’s episodes are duplicated as “trivia tracks” with random facts about the show and everything in general (example: the definition and origin of the word “atrium”) running throughout.
Several of the special features revolve around the show’s music. You can play samples from the show’s soundtrack, watch a featurette on Randy Newman‘s rendition of the show’s theme song “Little Boxes” (Malvina Reynolds) for the season’s premiere episode and watch three different musical montages for “Little Boxes.” The montages use three different renditions of the show’s theme song set to animation, the best being Man Man’s cover set to a black and white stage with the characters parading around as vaudevillian bobble headed puppets on strings.
The “Uncle A.W.O.L.” featurette centers around Justin Kirk regaling the viewer with tales of how his character Andy Botwin attempted and succeeded in not being sent to Iraq in the military. It’s a little over the top with two beautiful female assistants fawning over Kirk and bragging about his acting ability, but is still funny and worth watching. The biography on season guest star MK Olsen is informative, spanning the life of her acting career as well as her current endeavors with fashion, but seems to be voiced over by Mr. Moviefone, which kind of weirded me out.
Of all the set’s features, the absolute standout is “G.M.A. – Good Morning Agrestic!” The premise of “G.M.A.” the third highest rated public access show in southern California, is that it’s a public access talk show created and run by Shane Botwin with hosts Dean Hodes (Andy Miller) and Pam Gruber (Becky Thyre). On the “G.M.A.” episode titled “Wake and Bake 2,” chef extraordinaire Andy Botwin and former city councilman and “Good Morning Agrestic” weatherman Doug Wilson (comedic genius Kevin Nealon) demonstrate how to bake banana bud bread, “because you bake it with your bud.” It’s a recipe for laughter (and bad puns) and by far the funniest feature in the set. Do not miss this!
“Weeds: Season 3″ on DVD drops just in time to play catch up before season 4 begins on Monday, June 16th at 10PM. With three discs of five episodes each, you’ve got plenty of time to view season 3 in its entirety at just over an episode a day. Or, if you’re harder core than that, you can do a disc a day and have the entire season knocked out in the 3 days. I did. Yeah, really.
If you’re a “Weeds” newbie, pick up the first two seasons; you won’t be disappointed. And make sure to catch “Weeds” season 4 premiere on Monday, June 16th at 10PM (and every subsequent Monday) to find out where the Botwins will end up now that Agrestic/Majestic has gone down in flames.
Weeds: website | facebook fanpage | music | Music from the Series, Vol. 3 review | order DVD, soundtrack
Showtime: website // Lionsgate: website
