by Joy Press
Talking about her ability to rub colleagues the wrong way, Kohan admits with a chuckle, “I’m a big personality, shall we say. I realized early on my path would be easier if I were in charge.”
So she began writing pilot scripts every season, hoping to find a side door to success. One of her scripts got her hired on Friends, a job she lost thirteen episodes later, after arguing with her older bosses about the authenticity of the twenty-something characters. Rethinking her career choice, Kohan left Hollywood to hike through Nepal. But even in the midst of Himalayan grandeur, she couldn’t shake the TV bug, cranking out a draft of a spec script for Frasier in the land of Sherpas and Buddhist monks. “That made me realize, maybe I’m not quite done,” she laughs. Kohan went back home and wrote for Boston Common, Mad About You, and Gilmore Girls, but none of the jobs lasted. It wasn’t until 1996, when she landed a job on HBO’s Tracey Ullman sketch-comedy series Tracey Takes On, that she found anyone approximating a mentor.
What Kohan learned by observing Ullman up close was “how to run a healthy show,” one that didn’t involve bruising ego battles and soul-sapping creative conflict. Kohan also found it helpful that she could give Ullman material and she would “immediately perform it and let me know how it was.” Kohan stayed for four seasons, during which she won an Emmy. Yet all the while, she kept on writing pilots—seventeen or so, among which were a couple of near misses.
In 2004, one of Kohan’s creations finally made it onto the small screen. CBS sitcom The Stones was advertised as “from the creators of Will & Grace,” David Kohan and Max Mutchnick. Its true mastermind was David’s thirty-five-year-old sister. The Stones starred Judith Light and Robert Klein as a divorced couple living under one roof, tossing barbed comments at each other as their long-suffering kids looked on. (“Are you sure you’re at your dating weight?” Light quips. “Watch me lose a hundred thirty pounds in one second,” Klein replies, removing his wedding ring.) With low ratings and mediocre reviews, the show was axed after several episodes.
Jenni Konner, who worked on The Stones’s writing staff, was struck by Kohan’s originality even then. “I just think network wasn’t a place for Jenji. It’s not even because she was trying to do extreme sex scenes or something like that. It just felt like there was this innate struggle that I hadn’t seen on other shows.” Part of that, Konner says, was that Jenji didn’t have complete control—and, she adds, “the person who had control over her was her older brother. Who wants that? There are some people who should just have their own place in the world.”
Christopher Noxon, Kohan’s husband and collaborator, calls The Stones “a crushing experience, where she really just threw her hands up. Weeds was her Hail Mary,” he says. “It was like, ‘All right, fuck all of ya.’ ” Kohan was ready to give up her network-television dream and make her way in the promised land of cable TV.
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Despite her background in lighthearted family sitcoms, Kohan secretly yearned to create a female antihero. Obsessed with The Shield and The Sopranos, she decided to write a series centered on a criminal. The only question was: which crime? Pot was in the news then, thanks to California’s medical marijuana initiative Proposition 213, so Kohan fastened on the idea of a suburban homemaker who turns to drug dealing to support her family after her husband’s death. HBO passed on her pitch, but pay cable competitor Showtime took a gamble on it.
For years, Showtime had been struggling to escape the shadow cast by the critically acclaimed HBO. At first, it tried targeting the neglected niches of America: Queer as Folk for the LGBTQ crowd, Resurrection Blvd. for Latinos, Soul Food for African Americans. Then, in 2003, new head of programming Robert Greenblatt (who’d been an executive producer on Six Feet Under and had been involved in the Sopranos pilot) took over. He itched to compete on HBO’s challenging terrain.
So, when Jenji Kohan walked into the Showtime offices and pitched Weeds, the executives listened eagerly. Sitting in a lotus position on the couch, Kohan told vice president Danielle Gelber that the idea was inspired by the mother of a high school friend who dealt pot. While visiting her friend’s house one day and looking for an after-school snack, young Jenji opened the refrigerator crisper and found marijuana instead. The mom, Kohan recalled, wore a blazer with secret compartments stuffed with pot. Gelber sensed that Kohan, if unleashed, could make a lot of noise for Showtime.
“Weeds felt really fresh and different,” says Burley, a Brit with a bone-dry manner who was quickly hired as a producer. “Marijuana is now legal in some states and may be legal in all the Blue states in a few years, but at that time it felt out there.” Weeds’s tone was also unorthodox: it was a half-hour series that mixed black comedy and soapy drama. The word dramedy had been coined in the late eighties for shows, such as The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, that slipped dark subject matter into the traditionally lighthearted sitcom format. The genre requires actors who can operate on several levels simultaneously. In true comedy, a happy ending is assured; in dramedy, a character might be making people laugh while disaster enfolds her.
Kohan wrote Nancy Botwin to be “human, relatable, flawed,” and she needed to find an actress who could make all those qualities come to life. Stage and screen actress Mary-Louise Parker had won a Tony for the play Proof and an Emmy for her role as a hallucinating Mormon in Angels in America; she’d recently come off a run playing feminist Amy Gardner on West Wing and gravitated to the edgy suburbia Kohan had conjured with Weeds. A single mother herself, she found the show’s relatively brief commitment (thirteen half-hour episodes) appealing.
“There were other TV shows offered to me at the time, and people were like, ‘You are really going to do a show on Showtime?’ It was like I was saying I was going to do a show at Duane Reade!” Parker says, sitting in a banquette at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, dressed in drapey black layers of fabric. In the flesh, she seems to vibrate emotion as viscerally as she does on-screen.
“West Wing lived within its framework. There are things you just can’t do on West Wing. But there was almost nothing you couldn’t do on Weeds,” she says, exhaling deeply. It was a show where plot twists “bumped up against moments of sweetness and humanity—that’s what made it difficult to pinpoint as a comedy or a drama.”
The pilot suggests that Weeds might be a sly swipe at American hypocrisy. Setting recently widowed Nancy Botwin against the backdrop of a conservative suburban community, it opens with her standing before a PTA meeting. None of her fellow parents has any idea that while the Botwin kids are at school, Nancy commutes between her gated community and the kitchen of her drug supplier, Heylia (Tonye Patano). Nancy tries hard to prove to Heylia and her extended family that she’s not a “dumbass white bitch” slumming it in the ghetto, but she keeps giving herself away, such as when she hands over money for the week’s weed supply in a cute ribbon-tied package, as if it’s a crafting project. A lot of the show’s laughs, and its uncomfortable edge, come from the way that Nancy doesn’t fit in in either of the worlds she moves through.
Weeds had wicked fun tampering with the wholesome, all-American ideal of the soccer mom: While watching her son Shane play a match, Nancy slips city councilman stoner Doug (ex-SNL star Kevin Nealon) a magazine containing his stash. She is employing the kind of housewifely pluck that once led women to become Avon ladies—except she’s peddling a whole other brand of escapism.
By the middle of the first season, however, it became clear that Kohan had something altogether more deranged in mind than satirizing suburbia. Intoxicated by danger and fueled by caffeine, Nancy begins seeking ever-wilder thrills. Instead of being intimidated by a rival local drug dealer, she screws him in an alley in broad daylight. Similarly, when she realizes that her new fling (indie film favorite Martin Donovan) is a DEA agent, she marries him. Not only won’t he turn her in, he busts her competition. At every turn, she uses her beauty as a weapon or a shield, eventually working her way up the illicit-drugs chain until she is romancing Tijuana mayor Esteban Reyes (Dem
ián Bichir), whose public office conceals his secret identity as a narcotics kingpin.
Nancy is a complex, towering antiheroine, and Parker imbues this ruthless character with a crumbly fragility. You can see emotions percolating under the surface of her ivory skin, as if she were mustering all her energy to maintain that deadpan composure.
“Nancy doesn’t think ahead very much, doesn’t really put other people ahead of her. People who have a sweetness about them—they get away with a lot of shit,” Parker says, her lips turning up in what could be a grin or a grimace. “I love that character, and I love how Nancy is ultimately a very charming woman used to things going her way.” That self-belief powers her self-reinvention from forty-something wife and mother to canny entrepreneur, cooking up a succession of businesses. There’s a baked-goods shop, grow houses, a potent strain of pot dubbed “MILF weed,” in honor of the then recently coined slang, and in a flash forward to the near future, a chain of legal marijuana stores so successful that Starbucks wants to buy them. She is a paragon of American start-up success.
As deliciously brazen as Nancy Botwin is, there are always a half-dozen other brilliantly drawn characters orbiting and abetting her: her brother-in-law, Andy (Justin Kirk), a slacker who teaches Nancy’s sons important lessons (such as how to masturbate effectively) and emerges as the unlikely moral compass of the series; the aforementioned Doug, who becomes Chong to Andy’s Cheech in their own personal stoner comedy; next-door neighbor Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), Nancy’s nemesis, who’s put through the ringer with cancer and prison. And of course, there are Nancy’s two young sons: Silas (Hunter Parrish), who retains an essential goodness, and Shane (Alexander Gould), who blossoms into a fine young sociopath.
While she leverages her sexuality and thrives on risk, Nancy strives to be a good mother to her boys. But her job continually puts her family in jeopardy; even worse, it becomes clear that she finds playing for high stakes way more fulfilling than living her stable old life as wife and mom. Her TV precursors Roseanne Conner (who barked insults at her kids but provided a bedrock of affection and support) and Lorelai Gilmore (who fed Rory a diet of junk food but devoted her whole existence to her daughter) were lousy parents only when measured against an impossible maternal ideal. Nancy veers perilously close to becoming the one thing that TV audiences had never accepted from a woman: an actively bad mother, someone who puts her children in harm’s way while also eroding their sense of right and wrong.
Even Botwin “family time” sometimes results in rather warped scenarios. When the boys’ grandmother Bubbe, hooked up to a life-support machine in her home, begs to be allowed to die, Nancy makes a graceful elegiac speech and shuts off the respirator. Yet Bubbe’s body stubbornly breathes on. As the camera pulls outside into the dark night, as if withdrawing from a scene too awful to contemplate, you can hear Nancy’s dry command: “Shane, get Mommy a pillow.” We never see Bubbe again.
Although Showtime encouraged Kohan’s imagination, Burley recalls some early concerns about increasingly edgy plots involving Nancy’s sons. “There were strong discussions about whether [the kids] should be smoking pot or selling pot,” he says. “But Jenji would stick to her guns, and after a while they stopped asking. They were a little afraid of her.” And what about the child actors themselves, Hunter Parrish and Alexander Gould? Jenji confesses to feeling guilty sometimes about giving the boys such “rough material.” She says, “I hope they can pay extensive therapy bills with the money they made on the show.”
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Battered by the network sitcom system, Kohan had long dreamed of creating her own work environment: a sane, balanced place for the hatching of unbalanced characters.
Parker’s relationship with Kohan, however, became a tense battle of wills between two detail-oriented women with strong visions. “She’s very used to getting her way, and this was my baby,” Kohan told an audience at the Writers Guild in 2010. “There was a lot of push and pull.” Eventually, producer Lisa Vinnecour became a kind of liaison mediating between the showrunner and the actress. A “diva whisperer” (as Kohan once called her), Vinnecour went on to run the Orange Is the New Black set, where she made the sprawling cast feel like a tight-knit family. Vinnecour shrugs off the word diva, however, protesting, “These are artists.”
Like Shonda Rhimes, Kohan swore by a “no assholes” hiring policy. This became even more of a priority when she gave birth to her third child on the night of the Weeds premiere in August 2005. She brought in Roberto Benabib (a filmmaker who had written for Ally McBeal) to help run the writers’ room. At first it consisted largely of men (several of them playwrights); as the series progressed, Kohan hired more women, but she believed that hiring ought to be gender-blind and color-blind. “I think it’s really limiting to say that only women can write women or black people can write black people,” she tells me. “It’s an exercise in imagination!”
Exercise their imagination the Weeds writers did. Every time the series seemed to be settling into a groove, Kohan and company yanked the carpet out from under it. After three successful seasons set in the upper-middle-class suburb of Agrestic, California, Kohan says, “The writers were getting antsy and talking about projects they wanted to write in the off-season. I said, ‘What do we have to do here to bring all the creative energy back into the room?’ And they basically said, ‘We’re sick of suburbia.’ ”
Kohan unleashed a radical solution: she burned down Agrestic and relocated the action to a beachside town, bringing in new characters and eliminating some old favorites. This became a pattern: whenever the show seemed to be stagnating, Nancy and her drug-peddling clan moved elsewhere—to Mexico, across America, and eventually back to a rebuilt Agrestic. “We write ourselves into a corner, we all go away and relax, and then we come back and say, ‘How do we get ourselves out of this mess that we made?’ ” is how Kohan explains the Botwin family’s trademark restlessness.
Her craving for change even manifested itself in the show’s theme music. She had chosen the acerbic, anti-suburbia folk song “Little Boxes,” by Malvina Reynolds, from the outset—in fact, when she was struggling to write the pilot script, she typed the song’s lyrics just to fill up the first page. Christopher Noxon, initially the show’s music supervisor, says they quickly started thinking about using cover versions of the song, because they were bored with the original. “That is the story of Weeds,” Noxon says. “Jenji just didn’t want to do the same thing again.” Soon they were barraged by requests to cover “Little Boxes,” and went on to air versions from dozens of musicians, including Elvis Costello, Death Cab for Cutie, Angélique Kidjo, and Regina Spektor.
Ultimately, Weeds accomplished exactly what Showtime had hoped. It reframed the cable network as a creative daredevil in the scripted-television arena, a brash upstart nipping at HBO’s heels. To solidify its image as a home for dangerous women with attitude, Showtime launched a string of shows created by women: Ilene Chaiken, Michele Abbott, and Kathy Greenberg’s The L Word; Lucy Prebble’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl; Liz Brixius and Linda Wallem’s Nurse Jackie; Diablo Cody’s United States of Tara; and Darlene Hunt’s The Big C. At a time when HBO had no series by female creators on the air, flawed heroines became Showtime’s signature. By the end of 2009, the pay cable network had increased its subscribers by more than 25 percent.
Yet Weeds itself never quite got the respect it deserved. Was it because it was a half-hour dramedy rather than an hour-long drama? Was it because its protagonist was a middle-aged mom? Or maybe because the show kept remaking itself?
A year after Weeds’s debut, another series about an ordinary person who turns to drug dealing to support the family premiered on AMC. Breaking Bad featured a mild-mannered high school science teacher named Walter White who, like Nancy Botwin, deployed charisma and cunning to penetrate the closed circuit of the drug underworld. Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad’s creator, confessed that he hadn’t heard about Kohan’s show when he pitched his own series. “If I had known of We
eds weeks or even days prior to that meeting, it’s likely I wouldn’t have had the will to go on,” Gilligan told Newsweek. But because he didn’t subscribe to Showtime, he wrote and sold his tale of a geek turned sociopath.
Walt represented the domesticated middle-aged American Everyman whose suppressed masculinity would burst through if truly tested—an alluring fantasy for suburban drones everywhere. Nancy also held the promise of self-transformation through accessing hidden depths of reckless courage and ruthlessness—but this was not something a mainstream audience necessarily enjoyed seeing in a middle-aged mom. By Breaking Bad’s finale, there was no doubt that Walt had become monstrous—yet he finished his life on his own terms, without ever going to jail. Nancy, on the other hand, gets her comeuppance. In season seven, we see her dressed in shapeless green prison garb at the conclusion of her three-year sentence in a Connecticut federal prison.
Just as Nancy Botwin was leaving behind prison life, Jenji Kohan’s jail time was beginning.
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While Kohan was working on the final season of Weeds, a friend gave her a copy of Piper Kerman’s memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. Kohan thought it would make a perfect next project, but when she pitched it to Showtime, she was stunned to hear them turning her down.
“I had your hit show for eight years, and you don’t want my next thing?” she marvels, her voice quivering with anger even now. But it wasn’t just Showtime that was skeptical about the appeal and viability of a show involving a multiracial cast of female criminals. “HBO passed,” Kohan notes sourly. “A lot of places passed.”