The Body of Her Work…

Mary-Louise Parker is “bitter” because of a scene she shot for the show Weeds. In a magazine interview she states she was talked into doing a bath tub scene naked by a director. This chick previously did nude scenes and/or photo shoots at the drop of a hat, provided the hat was artistic, of course. One with a big plume, so she’d have the fan dance option.

One of the show’s honchos answered her complaint by saying he thought it was one of the five best scenes she’d done on the show. Huh? what a fucking moron. I side with M(i)L(f). She is an attractive woman with a quirky acting style. That is until this crappy show. In a previous post, I explained just how bad I think Weeds is. I seriously doubt there are five good scenes in all the episodes, of which there are about 40 too many.

If you don’t know, the premise is: widowed suburban wife faced with poverty takes up dope dealing in a bedroom community. It is about as realistic as me imagining this blog will get me a Pulitzer. Not that TV is realistic, i.e. the evening news. . .. But the writing is strictly that smarmy, inside joke, stereotype driven shit these hacks spew and get paid to write. The acting is from the “look at me, mom” school. Yack. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this is Tyler Perry’s favorite show. For all I know, he’s appeared on it—no doubt cross dressers smoke weed and lots of it.

Not everybody likes nudity on TV. I don’t. It’s distracting from the plot. No matter what anybody says, naked is not integral to any exposition of a plot point. If it is, then so is milking a cow anytime a character has cereal. Oh she has to be naked, she’s taking a bath. What a load— Hollywood imagines every contemplative female lies in a tub filled with rose petals, sipping wine with Enya playing in the background. As opposed to slumped on the couch with a container of ice cream watching Casablanca? Casa cliché is more like it. Just ask the late Robert Altman, he loved getting female actors naked for no reason in his work. Of course he was an auteur and that was cinematic nu-diddity (sic/sick).

As usual I am much too lazy/ill to do an exegesis on the history of TV nudity. On over the air TV, its been virtually non-existent. Though some might not recall a time before subscription programming, the Federal Communications Commission (now there’s a bunch of creeps), ruled over even the tight network censorship. Once cable started raking in bucks though, nudity was available there. You paid for it—you got it.

Anyway—sigh—ML has had it rough. She has relationship issues. I have empathized with her in the past, and I’m sure her traumatic experiences with men led her in a moment of weakness to take the role in Weeds. Then she proceeded to get engaged, then un-engaged, then re-engaged, then not again to Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen), her occasional co-star on the show (he portrays her late husband in flashbacks). Has she watched those scenes he did? I have never seen a more cloying portrayal in my life, unless it was him in the show Supernatural. Shit, I’d have killed him long before he died of natural causes. Hmmmmm or did he!

So Mary Louise has been compromised artistically and immortalized on You Tube. Oddly she once did a movie—Naked in New York— in which she was not naked. Undercutting her discontent though is the fact she’s had a few other dishabille moments on the show. I guess this one bugged her for some reason more than the others. Basically, the whole show bugs me. I knew a suburban divorced wife who was a pot dealer. If she had looked like ML Parker, I’m reasonably sure I’d have requested she do a nude scene too. One thing is for sure—the writing would have been better. As for Weeds, I suggest they change the title of the show to Dopes.

W is for. . ..

This is about two disparate TV shows. One is now history, the other continues. Both focused on drug dealers in the early 21st Century. The shows are The Wire and Weeds. I’m not going to promote the latter, and as the former has finished it’s run, I’ll just state the obvious. If you want them they are available for purchase or rent.

Weeds has as its premise, upper middle class wife in California, suddenly widowed, & heavily in debt becomes a pot dealer. In the most cloying flashbacks ever, her late husband is shown as some kind of saint. The barf factor is high and doesn’t stop. The writer(s) obviously got their street smarts from an old Starsky & Hutch show. This woman wouldn’t last a day in the real world of dopers. In fact, she’d more likely be a vic on a CSI slab, for a nice crossover sweeps stunt, those network humps love.

The cast, who I decline to mention by name, is so filled with cliched posers & over-acters, it appears that was the goal in casting them. It’s garbage, the kind of program that thinks having a cameo by Snoop Dog is the height of clever. There is a character named Snoop in The Wire. That Snoop is one of the scariest bitches in history. Not TV history—all of history. If only she’d shown up on that MILF Meets Dogg ep! Now that would’ve been stunt casting!

The Wire is nothing short of the best TV show ever. Sure it has cops, lawyers & drug dealers. The like of which has rarely been seen in a major television production. The writing & acting burned with verisimilitude. Partly because, some of those people were from the streets of Baltimore, where The Wire is set. Characters were multi-layered and had story arcs which went from the first episode of the first season to the last of the series, a five year span.

I’ve stated before, nothing on TV, especially the so called news is that real, all the time. No work of fiction puts you there, it just can’t do it. Even when you’re there, you miss some things. Life is Rashomon, like it or not. By accident, the news gets it correct occasionally. When a TV writer gives the extra effort to give the viewer a genuine catharsis, it’s as gratifying as it is rare.

The characters of The Wire are written and acted so well, you can’t help but care about even the bad guys. As with most good writing, it was a close call, who was good. No one was left without a flaw. Most of them the tragic kind. Any attempt to choose the standouts in this would virtually demand a cut & paste of the cast list. Even as I write this, I keep thinking of how to limit it to maybe three, and it’s impossible.

And there are astonishingly fluid relationships. Things you don’t see coming, even when you’re looking for it. Some of these actors created characters so indelible, they will be forever recognized. Sure, that happens a lot. But I assure you mostly it happens due to quantitative reasons. This is purely qualitative.

For me, there is more evil in a scene of Weeds where a leering Snoop Dogg is rapping how he’d like to fuck Mary Louise Parker, than any sociopathic hit Snoop executes in The Wire. She is doing her job from her POV, as we see it, a reprehensible job, given impetus by a world she didn’t create, just uses her regrettable skill to survive it. The teleplay of the other Snoop has him being him all right, but it’s a contrived scene born of the fevered imagination of a lameass, sitting in her SoCal dreamland.

Weeds, named after one of the many slang terms for marijuana, belongs in the weeds. The Wire, which is cop talk for a phone tap, electric with a message, pumped along a wire from the twisted soul of an inner city nightmare to the true heart of art.