Weeds has its detractors, but I am not one of them. But the show has changed. In its early seasons it was a critique of upper-middle-class suburban banality and hypocrisy, and an insightful one at that. Since season four, it has become a show about how easy it is to find oneself doing sincerely sinister things. If the marijuana is locally-grown by reasonably-paid farmers, there is absolutely nothing immoral about selling it. So when we meet Nancy Botwin she’s someone doing a reasonable thing to support her family. Once she leaves Agrestic it becomes clear that we’re watching a larger, more epic story: the story of a woman who is willing to compromise any values she ever had, chasing after a false notion of what it takes to protect her family. I think it’s riveting.

But that’s not what this blog is about! I want us to talk about the theme song, from when the show was all about the suburbs. This sequence shows us how everything in the suburbs looks identical, so someone like Nancy - a transgressor - would stick out like a sore thumb. Every now and then we get a reminder that, deep down, Nancy is just like a lot of the people we see in this sequence. She drives and SUV and SLURPS her iced coffee drinks super loud. Basically the fact the she interacts with black people ever (I miss Romany Malco on this show) is the only thing that sets her apart from, say, Celia Hodes.

The song choice is a fairly obvious one. “Little Boxes” has been anthemic since Malvina Reynolds (who sings it in the show’s first season) wrote it and her bfff (best folk friend forever) Pete Seeger covered it. But, if we can be honest for a second, this song misses its mark a little bit.

Tom Lehrer, famous crotchety individual, allegedly called “Little Boxes,” “the most sanctimonious song ever written,” and while I believe there are more sanctimonious songs, he’s not wrong about the sanctimoniousness. The houses made of ticky-tacky, that all look just the same? Those were people’s first homes. Immigrants, children of immigrants, poor people, and minorities were suddenly able to own property because of these cheap building materials. Identical ticky-tacky houses may well have not been the most original things to look at, but they did a lot of good for a lot of people, and essentially created a middle class.

Listen, nobody’s trying to defend conformity or The Suburbs. But little’s black and white in this world. A point well-made by Weeds, in general. </wrap-up>