To View a Picture Within Its Frame: A Contextual Analysis

In many ways, television shows can be viewed as some of history’s greatest time capsules. Images of the home, work, and family have changed drastically since the birth of the sitcom, and quite often we can understand this change as being indicative of the continuously changing, shared understandings of these very ideas.

Early television “confined women to the home and family setting,” (Press, 139). During the 1950s and early 1960s the TV sitcom touted the picture perfect nuclear family and the idealistic suburban lifestyle. Women maintained the home and cared for the children while the men went off to work in order to provide for their family. In the 1970s, as it became increasingly acceptable for women to enter the workplace and for the utopian suburban ideal to be sidelined in favor of pursuing independent and alternative lifestyles, we began to see shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Julia emerge with great popularity. In the postfeminist era of the 1980s and the 1990s we began to see many of the earlier feminist images give way as “television undercut the ideals of liberal feminism with a series of ambiguous images,” that challenged its previous gains (Press, 139). Here, women on TV were often shown in the workplace, but not without displaying a degree of yearning for and feeling of displacement from their traditional roles within the family and the home. Today’s TV shows present a “third-wave-influenced feminism,” that focus on introducing images more diverse in “race, sexuality, and the choices women are seen to make between work and family,” (Press, 142).

Weeds, Showtime’s hit serial dramady now on its 5th season, makes a pronounced effort to displace many outdated notions of female financial dependence and their relationships to the home and family as it tells about the life of a widowed, upper-middle class, mother who turns to selling pot as a means of maintaining the cookie cutter suburbanite lifestyle she was left upon her husband’s premature death.

Weeds provides us with an interesting convergence of past notions of the suburban ideal coupled with certain postmodern feminist ideologies relating to female independence and sexual agency.
Nancy Botwin brings new meaning to this modern notion of female financial independence by entering a lucrative industry historically dominated my the male gender. Nancy embodies this modern notion that women can be mothers as well as providers, and though at times her judgment and moral compass stray from what many would consider appropriate for a mother of two, she is able to command respect from her peers and business partners alike.

Though Nancy has been able to sustain the upper middle class lifestyle for her and her children for five entire seasons by dealing drugs, we often see her sexuality framed as a means of advancing her status and position in the male dominated world of drug sales. Still others may read Nancy’s employment of her sexuality as not only pragmatic, but supplementary to the creation of the complex image of the female gender that remains central to the present feminist agenda. Nancy displays control over her sexual agency and whether or not her use of it is understood as politically correct, we must acknowledge that her calculated employment of her sexuality offers an empowering and complicated image of women in today’s society.