Pot and prostitutes make for great entertainment

You have to wonder what Showtime will come up with next. A dark comedy about a smokin' hot abortionist? Maybe a sexy romp set in the world of human trafficking?

It really doesn't matter which boundaries the pay channel obliterates next, as long as the results are half as entertaining as its new pot-and-prostitutes, cannabis-and-courtesans, hookahs-and-hookers block of "Weeds" (10 p.m. today) and "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" (10:30 p.m. today).

When last we saw her, the authorities were closing in on Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), suburbia's favorite widow-turned-dealer. In need of a fresh start, she had doused her sofa with gasoline and set it ablaze just in case the advancing wildfires didn't consume her house.

Now, she's on the run, dragging her family -- sons Silas (Hunter Parrish) and Shane (Alexander Gould) and brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk) -- to a new life on the coast with her dead husband's grandmother Bubbie (Jo Farkas).

True, Bubbie never liked Nancy. And Bubbie may have gone out of her way to kill the neighbor's dog. But Bubbie has a little house a block from the ocean -- and more importantly, considering Nancy's next career move, it's within sight of Mexico.

Only Nancy didn't count on finding Bubbie lingering near death, hooked to an assortment of machines, in her living room. Or that Bubbie's up-to-no-good son Lenny (Albert Brooks) would be looking after her, when he wasn't throwing his money away at the track.

I have to be honest, Brooks works so infrequently, I wasn't entirely sure he was still alive. But the overly choosy comedy icon is fantastic as Lenny and deserves his own cable series now, before he goes back into hiding.

"You're sitting in my mother's living room," he tells Nancy, minutes after she had broken into Bubbie's home, "eating German food and smelling like gas. She was in Auschwitz for Christ's sake. What kind of a monster are you?"

The fourth season of "Weeds" is all about change. Now that Nancy's no longer in whatever's left of her idyllic master-planned community, Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" no longer fits, and TV's most annoying theme song has been dropped. (Now, that honor falls to "Two and a Half Men," whose theme -- with the lyrics "Men men men men manly men, ooh hoo hoo, hoo hoo, ooh" -- took three people to write.)

Nancy has changed jobs, too, moving into distribution and making several runs for the border for Guillermo (Guillermo Diaz), the drug kingpin who started the fire that burned down her neighborhood in the first place. If she keeps moving up like this, in a couple of seasons, she'll be Pablo Freakin' Escobar.

Billie Piper also has no trouble moving up. Or down. Or side to side for that matter. The singer-turned-actress stars as Hannah Baxter, and her high-end escort alter ego Belle, in "Secret Diary of a Call Girl."

"The first thing you should know about me is that I'm a whore," Hannah/Belle says right off the bat in today's premiere. But Piper manages to make the line sound less offensive and more like part of a forgotten Spice Girls anthem.

"Secret," which originally aired last fall on Britain's ITV2, is one of those series where the lead character will, from time to time, stop to talk directly to the viewer without anyone around her noticing. Hannah uses this device to divulge some of the tricks of her trade, so to speak -- to go unnoticed as a prostitute, for example, "be fabulous but forgettable" -- as well as to explain why she does what she does.

She likes the sex. She likes the money. And she's "fundamentally lazy." Playing against stereotypes, she wasn't abused, and, she says, "I've never been addicted to anything. Except maybe the fourth season of 'The West Wing.' "

"Secret" opens with Hannah walking the streets of London, talking about her love for her hometown, and it looks for all the world like the series is shaping up to be a sort of "Paid-for-Sex and the City."

But there are no gal pals, and the series turns out to be more about her evolving relationship with her best mate, ex-boyfriend Ben (Iddo Goldberg), and her struggles to keep Hannah's and Belle's lives from overlapping.

From its toothy, girl-next-door star to its Amy Winehouse theme song, everything about the series is sexy -- aside from a handful of Belle's clients -- and it manages to be adult without being filthy. OK, it's kind of filthy, but classy filthy.

"Secret" has the fabulous thing down cold. It's the forgettable part that's going to need a little work.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Mondays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.