In 2005, Showtime introduced Weeds, a dark comedy with a twist. Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker), a newly widowed mother, supports her suburban lifestyle by selling marijuana. Nancy’s ambitions endanger her safety, her older sons develop criminal tendencies, and a jail term separates her from her infant son. Yet she can’t stop dealing, as she is addicted to the adventure and financial freedom it affords. Weeds paved the way for Showtime’s Nurse Jackie (2009-), featuring an emergency-room nurse (Edie Falco) devoted to her career and hooked on prescription painkillers. Her secrets unravel, causing her to divorce and lose custody of her daughters.
While both series offer insights into criminality, addiction, and modern medicine, much of the critical response centers on Nancy and Jackie as mothers. Critics have declared Nancy the “worst mom in the world” and credited Showtime for creating the “anti-mom.” As dealers and addicts, Nancy and Jackie are extreme figures offering viewers absolution for their own imperfect parenting. Yet these characters face real-life challenges – including judgments of other mothers, pressures of being a breadwinner, and struggles to manage their teens’ sexuality and mental health – and emerge as sympathetic despite their failings.
My presentation examines how television intervenes in cultural debates about motherhood and female power. Such series could be viewed as postfeminist, as they illustrate the pitfalls of female ambition. However, I argue that these female-authored comedies also serve subversive functions. Nancy and her African-American suppliers appear more compassionate and tuned in to their children than the uptight suburbanites on Weeds. Nurse Jackie is a source of stability and support to others, even as she pursues self-destructive behavior. Both series offer rare depictions of women as breadwinners with partners who are more hands-on with childcare. The very aspects that make these women misguided mothers may resonate with viewers who desire to see women transcend the domestic realm and shamelessly pursue their ambitions.
About the presenterKatherine Lehman
Katherine J. Lehman is author of the book Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture (University Press of Kansas, 2011). She is associate professor of Communications at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, where she also co-directs the Women’s and Gender Studies program. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico (2007). She has presented at both regional and national PCA/ACA conferences, and her article “Woman, Divided: Gender, Family and Multiple Personalities in Media” appears in the March 2014 issue of the Journal of American Culture. Other recent publications include articles on postfeminist motherhood in television; gender and generation in HBO’s Girls; queer identity in Glee; Mad Men’s portrayals of working women; and Rosie O’Donnell’s role on The View.