'Weeds' Actress Mary-Louise Parker on Her Happy Ending -- New York Magazine

Beauty and the Bleak

Mary-Louise Parker as Nancy, suburban dope dealer, in Weeds.

(Photo: Monty Brinton/Courtesy of Showtime)

To find Parker now, at 43, on Weeds is, for the cultish fan, to be both thankful she’s got this showcase and wistful for something more—shouldn’t this woman be off torching stages, stealing films, hoarding Oscars? Parker’s career is a testament to the fact that there’s a hunger for a woman who, as our own TV critic John Leonard (himself an unreconstructed Parkerphile) once wrote, can seem like she’s “always thinking about three things simultaneously, one of them scandalous.” Her characters often teeter on the brink of lunacy, but charmingly. Or, as one MLP devotee put it to me, “She’s convincingly smart. You know—she’s not Drew Barrymore.”

In fact, imagine for a minute that Barrymore starred in Weeds. The show would be a buffoonish disaster, rather than a compellingly kooky examination of what one suburban mother will do to keep her family together (sell pot) and what repercussions that has on her (occasionally jumping nearly naked in the swimming pool and screaming her head off underwater). Given how, in two seasons (the third premieres August 13), Weeds has drifted from a semi-plausible family drama to a brazen farce, it sometimes seems that Parker’s not just scrambling to keep her family together, she’s scrambling to keep her show together. She turned down the Teri Hatcher role in Desperate Housewives (and imagine that alternate reality, Parker exiled to Wisteria Lane, picking her teeth with the likes of Nicollette Sheridan), but said yes to Weeds because, as she says, “it was uglier.” Since then, it’s gotten prettier. “I think the pilot was uglier than the show turned out to be. Sometimes it slips into more broadly comic, which is not my favorite. I like it best when it lives in that more bleak, black-comedy place.”

Bleak, black, comic: That’s not exactly soothing. That’s not Drew Barrymore. That’s not a neatly packaged story of ascent (critically beloved young actress!), crisis (left pregnant and alone!), and optimistic dénouement (now star of her own TV show!). But people only live their lives like that on A&E. “Those shows follow a formula, so you know what’s coming,” she says. “They have happy endings. Sometimes you kind of need that.”