Spoilers for all seasons ahead. Like, big ones.

How a show about a white (sorta’ Jewish) middle-class family messes around with race.

Previous post on Nancy as a self-destructive hero (comments are more interesting than the post).

Whenever you discuss race in North America, it’s impossible to get very far without someone talking about “America as a melting pot” (Canada, by the way, is a ‘tossed salad’, which is funny on more levels than I can count). And it’s true that most American narratives of race are, on the surface anyway, about integration or assimilation, of overcoming difference to melt into the idea of ‘being an American’.

The reality, of course, is far more complex. The Cosby Show worked hard to say “here, white America, we can do like you do but not necessarily be like you”. There was an air of assimilation about the show, but it was an uneasy sort, one that was largely political and economic, but not cultural.

In one sense, the story is very often about a movement from, if you’ll excuse the terms, a ‘coloured’ margin to a ‘white’ centre. Stories very often ‘resolve’, and that resolution frequently takes homelessness or lack of belonging and then puts it right by finding a space for those characters in the mainstream (white) world.

Weeds sorta’ fucks around with this, in a way that I think is very interesting. Think about this:

• The show begins with Judah’ death, and the family’s means of material support suddenly gone. The lynchpin that held their ideal suburban life together disappears, and Nancy, devoid of much education or skill, turns to crime to maintain the lifestyle that she is both accustomed to and her community considers normal.
• To support her lifestyle, Nancy, the affable, affluent suburbanite, suddenly has to function away from the eyes of her community, carrying out her business ‘hidden in plain sight’.
• After Nancy’s botched marriage to Peter, there is no-one in a position of authority she can trust. The system that once protected her lifestyle is now opposed to it.
• Nancy continues to justify her lifestyle by assuming it hurts no-one.
• Her lifestyle starts to hurt people, but she is already way too deep in to simply walk away without fear or reprisal.
• After Agrestic burns down, Nancy must leave and start out again with nothing. It seems worth pointing out here that the focus on the side characters in the show switches from Heylia and Conrad to Guillermo and the Mexican cartel.
• Nancy is suddenly forced into work she does not want to do but desperately wants to succeed at (drug trafficking). When she fails at it, she is put to work at the maternity store, which she finds interminably boring and unfulfilling after the excitement and lucre of being a drug dealer.
• After a crisis of conscience of sorts, Nancy is nearly destroyed.

So Nancy’s narrative is the inversion of the usual American narrative of race. It’s about de-assimilation and de-integration (in addition to dis-integration). In inverting the traditional narrative of racial integration, it lays it bare as a construction and also asks us to question our easy, uncritical acceptance of it as normal or desirable.

The thing that I like about this fact is that it makes neat, conservative condemnations of criminality (and their consistent links to race and class) that much more difficult to maintain because it shows the psychological and social build-up to a life of crime. To wit, it’s true that people could just get ‘real jobs’; but Weeds makes it far more apparent to a mainstream audience why people don’t, and also why once you’re in, it’s nearly impossible to get out.

Granted, I’m being overly simplisitic here, and the show probably deserves a more nuanced reading – linking criminality and race is weird and uncomfortable -  but I think Weeds is more important and smarter than people give it credit for. It is still in many ways a comedy. But as the last episode (and its rape scene) showed, the show can also be brutally graphic and excruciatinly difficult to watch. That difficulty, however, seems like it’s worth working through, as Weeds seems to not simply an attack on suburbia, but on the narratives of identity and culture that have underpinned it.