Weeds, Seasons 2 + 3

The sly setup was over by the end of the first season. Then the DEA and U-Turn and a gang-of-the-month started making themselves guests uninvited, the series chalked an official body count on the tally board, the kids found out (oh heavens), and our flirtation with the fetching Ms Nancy Botwin stalled, as these things always do, with a table dance for heroin. The limber trick of escape performed by the writers in seasons two and three, after all the damning evidence against her character (as_a_mother) has been arrayed, is to make Nancy sympathetic anew. We come to realize a truth about her: She is far more damaged by the loss of Judah than she ever lets on. We don't know what she was like before, but without him there as the father she doesn't feel like a mother. Certainly not the rosy suburban mother-cliche that grates in her grief. She's alienated from her community and alienated from her boys; Judah was her connection to Silas and Shane. Andy has become more admirable for trying to step up, to reconnect Nancy to the world, but it can't be his fault that the task is beyond him. With no other family to call on, and as the Botwins transplant to even more alien soil, it's unclear how Nancy will ever be okay.