The TV Zone

Is it OK to trash "Weeds” yet, "Weeds" fans? Have you too been beginning to not feel the love? After all, it's been out of Aggrestic for a full season now, and as some have observed - a valued and even treasured character has been gone as well. Aggrestic not only gave "Weeds" a terrific theme song, but a terrific reason for being - a perfectly square foil, where all the houses had spread weed-like in neat little rows, and the squalid lives of those inside were both amusing and tragic.

"Weeds" was (maybe) the best show on Showtime - with the possible exceptions of "The Tudors" and "Dex."

No one can make that argument any more. "Weeds" has become untethered to reality - completely untethered, like some bloated balloon drifting further away...going...going...almost gone. "Weeds:" Caustic, bitter, profane, cynical, with bile surging through its atrophied, needle-punctured, sclerotic veins. That's actually the good stuff - what's missing in this list for the most part is "funny." It's barely watchable anymore.

I'm not sure where to begin: Nancy getting impregnated by a titanically murderous drug lord? (That's a good place to start.) Celia Hodes getting snatched by her own daughter and a hen-pecked leader of the revolution? (Sure - that's a good second place too.)

Look, I'm not trying to talk anyone out of Monday night ("Wonderful Wonderful") though you will have to wait another week till Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Nancy sis Jill) joins up, and later still for Nancy doc Alanis Morissette. Maybe it'll settle into a buzz-worthy routine. Maybe Esteban (Demián Bichir) doesn't kill Nancy after all (he's debating whether he should Monday night) and she makes it to Denmark with Andy. Maybe when Celia shakes the Stockholm syndrome (best part of Monday, by far), she can leave the jungle lair and get back to what she does best - ruin lives.

Maybe. I'm beginning to doubt it. (But JJL, above, courtesy Getty, is good...)

Here's the season five "behind-the-scenes" promo. Have at it...