Is Nancy Botwin Not A Desperate Housewife?

on Housewives & Weeds

When Mary-Louise Parker won a Golden Globe for her performance in Weeds a few years ago, the other four nominees (all of which were Desperate Housewives title characters and were considered heavy favorites against her) stood up and gave Parker a standing ovation. Teri Hatcher even made a short worshipping gesture to the young actress who surprisingly emerged from among award show regulars like herself and Felicity Huffman.

I remember her speech being short, sincere, kind of unusual and lots of fun.

In a sense, Parker's Botwin is very much similar to Hatcher's Susan - or to Frances Conroy's excellent Ruth Fisher in Six Feet Under or even Joely Richardson's either overwritten or overplayed Julia McNamara in Nip/Tuck. American suburbia seems to be the new popular target for artsy critism - a trend going as back as Alan Ball's 1999 masterpiece American Beauty. On TV today are many clueless, neurotic and deprived (sexually and otherwise) housewife characters that are branching from Annette Bening's memorable and Oscar-nominated performance. Not only these characters but also plots of these shows seem to be feeding from the same material; all wandering around the concept of how nothing is what it looks like in the rich suburbs. The idea of American dream and the struggles to reach it has been criticised numerous times but satirizing the artificiality, uniformity, hypocrisy and imperfection of the privileged few who were actually able to achieve this dream is new.

I think it's safe to say that in 2006 Globes, not four but five housewives were nominated for 'Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy'; and that one of them was simply from a different show. Nancy Botwin's problems regarding her family, her friends, her unorthodox occupation, her affairs that never seem to work out, her financial adversity that eventually works out and her always-present helplessness, failures and amendments create all the suspense and keep the show going. You don't need to look real deep to see the measure of her desperation - it's right there all the time. Through Nancy and her problems (and of course Parker's flawless acting skills) we are able to survive the endless tides of caricaturized characters, plot twists that take the show too close to an actual gangster flick, hasty climatic sequences or simply the moments when the show tries too hard to appear hip but ends up being hopelessly cheesy. It's how we connect. And it was this same strength that had made Desperate Housewives a smash hit from the very first season, after which it lost this tone and turned into a series of thrillerish events inelaborately lumped together, failing to impress even the most devoted fans.


On the other side of all these similarities, we have a gigantic difference in the way these shows approach their title characters. In Desperate Housewives, Susan, Lynette, Bree and Gabrielle are guilty as much as they are desperate (this depiction holds maybe for the first season only, which is the only one worth discussing). They are contributors to the phoniness and insincerity of Wisteria Lane; and they are the primary subjects to criticism. The fact that audience sympathizes with them doesn't necessarily mean they are being backed up; it's possible to make people sympathize even with criminals as long as they are presented as the main characters in a movie or a TV show. In Weeds however, secondary characters like Celia Hodes (which bears a striking resemblance to Bree, who is only less of an asshole) are under this spotlight and the desperate housewife Nancy is praised for representing uniqueness in a neighborhood where everyone 'came out just the same'. With who she is and what she does for a living, she is one of the few colors in a black&white world. The four housewives appear to be randomly selected from among Wisteria Lane residents while Nancy shines in Agrestic (or later Majestic) and we feel like her story had to be told. That's why the critique of suburban life, which was the whole issue in Desperate Housewives, seems to be a secondary motive in Weeds when compared to the plot of weed-selling business and its absurdities. Two seemingly irrelevant issues -weeds and suburbs- are joined by the contrast between Nancy and her environment.


In the middle of the fourth season, I gave up all my hopes and stopped watching Desperate Housewives. I don't regret that decision, since the TV show version of American Beauty which had captivated me once, turned into something unrecognizable afterwards. I can say Weeds has been increadibly more consistent. And Mary-Louise Parker, by whom I was first impressed in Angels in America, makes smaller flaws more tolerable.