When Does Weeds Season 9 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Weeds about?

Mary-Louise Parker carries this show almost entirely on her posture. As Nancy Botwin, a recently widowed suburban mother who starts selling marijuana to maintain her family's lifestyle in a fictional Southern California enclave called Agrestic, she projects this specific combination of fragility and recklessness that makes you watch through your fingers. Jenji Kohan's series began in 2005 as a sharp satire of upper-middle-class American conformity, with Nancy's drug business functioning as a mirror held up to the hypocrisy of the gated community around her.

The early seasons are the sharpest. The show finds real comedy in the collision between Nancy's criminal enterprise and the relentless cheerfulness of suburban life, and the supporting cast, particularly Kevin Nealon as a reliably foolish city councilman and Justin Kirk as Nancy's anarchic brother-in-law Andy, keeps things lively. The tone is dark but buoyant, somewhere between a character study and a farce. As the seasons progress and Nancy's circumstances escalate from neighborhood dealer to cartel involvement to fugitive, the show gets wilder and loses some of the satirical grounding that made it distinctive. By the later seasons it is essentially a crime thriller wearing the skin of a comedy.

Critics responded warmly to Parker, who won a Golden Globe for the role, and the first few seasons earned strong reviews. Audience enthusiasm tended to cool as the show kept raising the stakes in ways that felt less earned than desperate. An 8-season run on Showtime testifies to its commercial durability even as the creative case for its continuation became harder to make around season five or six.

Weeds arrived just as premium cable was discovering what it could do with morally compromised protagonists, and it shares obvious DNA with shows that followed. But Parker's performance is specific in a way that outlasts the show's structural problems. There is something about the way Nancy Botwin keeps making the wrong choice with complete conviction that stays with you longer than the plot ever does.

Created by Jenji Kohan

Is Weeds renewed or cancelled?

Why did Weeds end?

Weeds ran for eight seasons on Showtime, which is a genuinely long run for a cable drama-comedy. By the time it wrapped in 2012, the show had long since exhausted the suburban satire premise that made it so sharp in its early years. Nancy Botwin selling weed in Agrestic was a specific, funny, pointed idea. But the show kept blowing up its own premise, literally burning down the cul-de-sac at the end of season three, and spent the next several years chasing a replacement hook it never quite found. Audiences noticed. Ratings had declined steadily from the peaks of the middle seasons, and by season eight the show was a fraction of its former self in terms of viewership.

Creator Jenji Kohan was also clearly ready to move on. She had a new project taking shape, one that would eventually become Orange Is the New Black for Netflix, and Weeds had said most of what it had to say. Season eight functions as a proper conclusion, jumping forward in time and giving Nancy and the rest of the Botwins something like resolution. That's not the shape of a cancellation. Showtime and Kohan chose to end the series on their own terms rather than drag it further into diminishing returns.

The honest verdict on Weeds is that it outlasted its best ideas by about three seasons, but at least it knew when to stop. Eight seasons and 102 episodes is a full life for any show, and ending with a planned finale rather than an abrupt cancellation meant the story got a real ending, even if fewer people were watching by the time it arrived.

Weeds Season 9 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

Weeds seasons

Weeds trailer

Where to watch Weeds

Amazon Prime VideostreamAmazon Prime Video with AdsstreamMovieSphere+ Amazon ChannelstreamAmazon VideobuyGoogle Play MoviesbuyFandango At Homebuy

Weeds latest news