Arts & Culture
The Best of TV with Dan Richter: summer spotlight
Arts and Review Reporter
This summer, the best way to survive the heat of the dog days doesn’t involve your DVD player. Instead, get a subscription to cable television’s Showtime channel.
Weeds
The latest season of the network’s perennial hit “Weeds” premiers on June 16. Now in its fourth season, “Weeds” follows the life of suburban widowed housewife Nancy Botwin (played by Tony Award and Emmy Award winner Mary Louise Parker). Botwin grows and sells marijuana in her lilywhite neighborhood of Agrestic, California in order to keep her affluent lifestyle and provide for her two children. In the fourth season, Nancy and her family move to the city of Ren Mar on the Mexican border in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong during the third season.
Rounding out the cast is Nancy’s best friend Celia, who is a member of the city board and is trying to put an end to drug use and crime in Agrestic; Andy, Nancy’s freeloading brother-in-law, who is dating a woman whose brother also sells drugs and is threatening the Botwins, Heylia and Conrad, Nancy’s supplier who grow a new strain of marijuana to market.
“Weeds” is one of the best written and acted programs on television today. Sometimes suspenseful, always comedic, “Weeds” takes a jab at not only the suburban lifestyle and what lies underneath, but also the American dream and how desperate people become to achieve it. This program alone is reason enough to start subscribing to Showtime.
Big Brother 10
If you’re a fan of reality TV, chances are you’ve heard of or seen the show “Big Brother,” which places a group of strangers into a giant house for three months. The catch? The contestants, called houseguests, are cut off entirely from the daily news, their friends and family and the rest of the outside world. After weeks of voting each other out, one person wins a $500,000 grand prize.
What sets Big Brother apart from other reality shows and makes it so great are the outrageous twists that are introduced each year. During one season, all the contestants (unknowingly) were put in the house with one of their ex-boyfriends or ex- girlfriends, which was a recipe for drama in itself. In another, the producers had found a half brother and sister who had no idea the other existed and placed them into the house, letting them figure out on their own (and on national TV) that they shared the same father. In the same season, two identical twins switched places in the house daily and played as one single person, until the other contestants caught on and realized that one player was actually two people. There has not yet been any other reality show to match the caliber of twists used in the “Big Brother” house.
Another thing that makes the series interesting is the fact that it is filmed live. In other words, in addition to the three episodes that air weekly on CBS, the happenings of the house are broadcast over the Internet on live camera feeds 24/7, allowing “Big Brother” junkies to watch the houseguests as often as they like. A special uncensored block of programming, known as “Big Brother: After Dark,” airs nightly on Showtime Too (another Showtime network). People can find “Big Brother” virtually anywhere they want.
“Big Brother 10” premieres July 13 on CBS, and “Big Brother: After Dark” premieres the same night on Showtime Too.
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