Weeds: Season 4 Review, by Tim Goodman of San Francisco Chronicle

One of the great intrigues of "Weeds" is also one of its biggest worries. When a show takes so many chances - some fans might say recklessly - when does it all implode? When does the creative risk become less rewarding and instead become annoying, or even detrimental?

Season 4 of the beloved Showtime series almost predictably ratchets up the chance taking, but the first three episodes are just as rich and compelling and funny and conflicted as any that have come before it. Whether Season 4 can continue to pull this off remains to be seen, but you have to give creator Jenji Kohan some credit for her fearlessness. Each season she has spun more plates than is reasonably wise and lived to see a clean floor and a content audience through it all.

But now she's onto something completely different (though not entirely unexpected given the show's history). When last we saw Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), the accidental pot-selling suburban mom, she had just poured gasoline on the furniture in her mini McMansion in Agrestic, the fictional suburban enclave of SUVs, minivans, clean lawns, good schools and a whole underbelly of upper-middle-class dysfunction. As she torched the house, just ahead of the advancing Southern California firestorms about to engulf Agrestic anyway, she sped away on a Segway with a wry smile on her face.

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'Weeds' returns, with everything up in smoke