Weeds running rampant

In Weeds' first season on Showtime, Jenji Kohan took an offbeat look at marijuana in Agrestic, an upscale Southern California subdivision of pseudo-Spanish houses. A suddenly widowed young soccer mom, Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker), plunges into dealing so she can keep herself and her family of two boys in the affluent style to which they have been accustomed.

Her customers include an accountant and city councilman, Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon), his attorney pal Dean Hodes (Andy Milder), and students at nearby Valley College.

Nancy's adventures with her supplier and expanding her business share the spotlight with the consumerism and competition of a town where everybody seems to be friends and enemies simultaneously. Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) supplies much of that melodramatic energy as PTA president and a very mean-spirited mother.

It was Showtime's highest-rated series in its first year. If only it had quit then.

By the time the fifth season ended, it had become very dark, a series of murders, rapes, shootouts and intrigues of violent rival cartels and Mexican politics.

Nancy, who had earlier married a DEA agent who was soon killed, now has had a baby by and is married to a Mexican drug kingpin and politician, Esteban Reyes. played by Demian Bichir, who's known as the George Clooney of Mexico. He's the mayor of Tijuana and running for governor. His glamorous woman campaign manager has threatened to have her older two sons killed, because "we don't need them for our pretty pictures." One of those sons promptly bashed her in the head with a croquet mallet and we last saw her face down in a swimming pool, blood spreading.

Season six is due to start airing in July. Can it possibly still be funny when we know that 18,000 people have died in the drug wars since the end of 2006 when Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war against cartels? When we know the violence is no longer confined to the border towns? It has escalated, just as the Weeds plot and sub-plots have.

For a comedy, it has become seriously not funny. There doesn't seem to be any logical way to end this saga except operatically, with corpses littering the screen.