On new turf

Reinvented 'Weeds' heads for the Mexican border with hot-button issues, a sharper edge - and Albert Brooks

Drug-dealing widow Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) relocates in season four of "Weeds." (Monty Brinton/Showtime)

HOLLYWOOD - Maybe the idea of a suburban mom selling pot just wasn't that subversive anymore. After all, cable TV also has suburban chemistry teachers making meth ("Breaking Bad") and suburban polygamists ("Big Love") hiding in tract homes. Even CBS shows suburban couples in mutual adultery ("Swingtown").

Maybe, as creator Jenji Kohan explained, the writers on "Weeds" were more excited about new projects they had in the works than the one they'd been writing for three seasons.

In any case, as writers embarked on the fourth season of Showtime's hit dramedy, returning tomorrow night, Kohan decided to change the show's premise, moving Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) out of her natural habitat to someplace less stifling - a California beach town near the Baja border. "It's a big TV taboo to move a show," she said. "The conventional wisdom is, you've built an audience that is tuning in to see this setting. If you move it, they'll get upset."

They still might. But Kohan, who revels in tweaking convention, said the borderlands offer an abundance of new opportunities for Nancy and her often raunchy and profane entourage to toy with sexual, political, racial, and religious taboos.

And to resharpen the show's original, sometimes precarious, edge.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, creative arguments between Kohan and Parker have subsided, they both said, as a new executive producer directed the transition. Parker, who won a Golden Globe for her role as the charming, self-centered widow and mother of two, said she was impressed with the changes. "I've never seen that. It's pretty brave," she said. "I like that."

The cast couldn't go home again, anyway. In last season's finale, Nancy rode off into the sunset on a Segway with her hometown in flames behind her. At loose ends, she decides, in tomorrow night's premiere, to move in with her estranged father-in-law (Albert Brooks), who lives in a scruffy house in a seaside town. Establishing shots show Tijuana, Mexico, and the border crossing, but most outdoor locations were shot in Manhattan Beach, in coastal, suburban Los Angeles.

The geographic change precipitated many others, and soon the operating word for the season became "reinvention." Malvina Reynolds's popular and much-covered theme song, "Little Boxes," had to go, along with the scene-setting titles that featured identically dressed suburbanites driving identical cars in identical neighborhoods.

The first episode will open with an empty swing set as a transition. After that, short title cards will introduce the theme of each episode and there will be no new music. "We weren't going to beat 'Little Boxes,' " Kohan said.

Some characters (business partners Heylia, Vaneeta, and budding love interest Conrad) were left behind. Others, including brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk) and Nancy's partner Doug (Kevin Nealon) have their reasons for tagging along. BFF Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), who took the fall for Nancy last season after informing on her, is preoccupied with jailhouse issues of her own.

Notably, Brooks will return to television in a special guest-star role as Nancy's father-in-law, Len Botwin, who cares for his comatose mother at home. And Nancy's old supplier Guillermo (Guillermo Diaz) will have a bigger role teaching her about trafficking on the border.

In this election year, Kohan said, the writers are exploring hot-button issues in the national debate, such as immigration and the drug trade. For homework, the creative team did a ride-along with the border patrol in Tijuana on a random weekday afternoon and returned with a treasure chest of dramatic scenarios, she said.

When the show was set in what looked like standard-issue American suburbia, its fans - surprisingly, a large number of teens and college students - liked its outlaw tone, even if the outlaw was a 40-something single mom who still had friends on the school board. The characters were outrageously outspoken in the way allowed only by pay cable.

After its first season as Showtime's top-rated original series, "Weeds" settled in as number two, behind "Dexter." Last year, the show became the network's most-watched by the cherished 18-to-34 demographic. Parker won the Golden Globe in 2006 for her performance, and the series has received several Emmy Award nominations.

This season, Nancy will be called upon to make some tough moral decisions. In an environment free of the typical social conventions of suburbia, she has a chance to build a life on her own terms, Kohan said. According to Parker, the task is like breaking an addiction to her old environment. It requires her character to become more aware and more proactive than she's ever been.

Until this season, Parker said, Nancy has been "propelled from one thing to the next by the momentum of her depression and disassociation." But each season, as the tone has grown darker, her character has become less passive, she said. "Before she was kind of nowhere. Now she's at least in the present without a clear understanding of past or future."