What will happen to Nancy Botwin, when “Weeds” (Showtime, 10 p.m.) closes up shop for good with a one hour series finale tonight?
“She’s fairly indomitable,” says Mary-Louise Parker, who has played the suburban antihero these eight seasons, “and guileless, and she just keeps going.
“And I think if there’s something appealing about her, maybe that’s it,” she told reporters at the TV critics press tour about the time the finale was being shot. “She just continues to make the wrong choices. Her heart’s usually in the right place, and she just can’t be defeated, and she keeps trying. “And to me, that’s what’s appealing about her.”
Show creator Jenji Kohan says they’ve considered their last episode more than once – in fact they had to consider whether a season finale was going to be the series finale more than once.
“We’ve written our end so many times not knowing what was coming next,” Kohan says. “And then we just sort of put our heads down and talked about how we want to leave this family because, ultimately, it’s a show about a family, and we’re shooting the finale now, and we hope it works.”
Parker thinks it did.
“I would hate to give away anything about it, but I just cried when I read it,” she said. “I think it’s beautiful. She managed to bring things together in a way that was really satisfying for me except for the fact that it was an end, because I think most of us are sad about that. I think she just managed to bring things together in a way that wasn’t necessarily a completely she didn’t sort of make it a total happily ever after thing, but there was hope in it, and there was some sort of benediction, I felt like. I think the finale is beautifully written, and I hope it lives up to what she wrote. I mean that really.”
Kohan said “Weeds” lasted as long as it did because it changed so much over that time. “I think we are around in year eight because we did change it up. I don’t think we could have sustained eight years in the suburbs recycling those stories. People’s lives change and evolve, and I think we reflected that in the show, and it kept it interesting for the writers, and it kept it interesting for the characters. And I think what stayed consistent was the tone and the characters and the mistakes they made. And once you’ve had that consistency, you can sort of take them anywhere and see how they would play in new ponds.”
“Weeds” returned to its starting point Agrestic last week and will likely be there when the show ends tonight. And with it is the anti-suburban protest song that was the show’s theme in the beginning, “Little Boxes.”
“I think we felt we were back in the suburbs to a certain extent so why not bring it back to ‘Little Boxes’?” Kohan said. “We first went away from ’Little Boxes’ when we left Agrestic and it was sort of our official break. And we had our little ‘Where’s Waldo?’ openings all those years which were really fun for us. But to bring it all home in the last season, we wanted to go back to our song. And we’d all been obsessed with those little RSA white board lectures online and we felt it would be nice to sort of tell our story and bring back our song.”