The year Weeds launched on Showtime was coincidentally the year my girls were born. I spent many late night feedings watching the show, and although it could sometimes be a little too mean, it was a great sitcom that followed a fairly winning formula. Each week, Nancy, the show’s lead and widowed suburban mom turned pot dealer, faced some ridiculous challenge related to her illegal business, and the fun was in watching how that challenge would be cleverly overcome.

There was a sense of empowerment in that first year — Nancy was constantly thinking and talking her way out of difficult situations that her suburban lifestyle often left her ill-equipped to deal with. The supporting cast was generally excellent, and the dialogue was sharp — in many ways, Weeds was a pot-smoking revision of Gilmore Girls.

But the second year lacked a lot of the charm of the first. As the episodes progressed, there was more of a focus on humiliating the ensemble cast — particularly Nancy’s brother-in-law Andy, who was not only sodomized by the crazed Israeli dean of a school for Rabbi’s, but had most of his toes eaten off by a dog. Yeah, I know, that’s definitely some funny stuff. Humiliation is a road often taken in comedy, but after awhile it became Weeds‘ chief approach.

And now with the start of season three’s grueling two-part premiere, I have to say I’m finally done with the show. With Nancy, Conrad and Sanjay under the thumb of a brutal, rapist thug named U-Turn, things have gotten so ugly that I had a difficult time bringing myself to finish each thirty-minute segment. At the end of it all, we saw Sanjay forced to have sex with a female associate of U-Turn’s, Conrad and Nancy humiliated repeatedly by U-Turn, Nancy’s DEA agent “husband”casually murdered by Aremenian thugs, Andy beaten up by yokels at a gas station after being mistaken for a child molestor, and the coup de grace, Nancy and Conrad ultimately end up enslaved by U-Turn after owing him a tremendous “debt.”

I know, I know — the show is about drug dealing, which is serious business. But the show is supposed to be a comedy, a satire of suburbia. I don’t want to spend the next 13 episodes of the show watching Nancy struggle as she tries to get out from under U-Turn’s control, forced to suffer one indignity after another. But thats unfortunately the way it appears to be panning out. It’s unfortunate that a show that was once so good has squandered its potential on low-road comedy and exploitation.

I miss the old Weeds, but it’s not enough to send me out to Best Buy to buy the DVD’s. With so much good television to watch, it’s nice to free up a half hour a week on other things. I guess in some ways I can thank the show’s producer, Jenji Kohan, for that. She made the show so unwatchable that I’m not even going to check in every once in awhile in the hopes that it’s gotten better. Nice work!