Jenji Kohan created Weeds for premium cable channel Showtime. She skipped the broadcast networks for this show because “the networks really operate within this culture of fear. They have advertisers to answer to. They need a hit…. They are very dependent on the past. You know, ‘This worked, so it should work again.’”

“I was looking for a subject where I could explore (life’s) gray areas,” something she’d been unable to do in network comedies, Kohan told TV critics earlier this year at a Los Angeles gathering to promote her half-hour comedy for premium cable’s Showtime channel.

Kohan is well aware that some people will have only one question about the show: How dare she make a drug dealer a sympathetic character, a widowed mom who’s nicer to Celia’s children than Celia is?

But that’s just the point, in the writer’s mind: It’s worth asking whether Nancy’s business enterprise is really so heinous.

“I like pot as a subject because it seems to be kind of the mild end of this whole drug debate,” Kohan said, adding that the dispute over the medical use of marijuana added a contemporary political charge.

She went on: “Personally, it’s not my drug. I don’t really enjoy it. But I did a lot of research, and as a political issue, I’m perfectly comfortable saying I believe that it should probably be legalized, regulated and taxed.”

[source: Journal Sentinel article by Joanne Weintraub]