I love on-demand, marathon TV watching. There is something wonderfully indulgent about picking up a great series and watching as many episodes as desired in one sitting, without the hassle of commercials, cliffhangers, and seasonal hiatus. And if there’s one thing Netflix has taught me, there’s a lot of great TV out there, and the shows are more accessible than ever.

On Sunday I finished my marathon run of the first five seasons of Showtime’s original dark comedy series, Weeds. At its core is recently widowed suburban mother, Nancy Botwin, who rejects traditional 9 to 5 employment in favor of dealing marijuana to maintain her family’s lifestyle. But Weeds is more than the exploits of Nancy and her supporting cast of eccentric neighbors, dead-beat brother-in-laws, and wayward sons. It’s also outrageous, political, controversial, and consistently surprising.

Nancy Botwin, as played by the doe-eyed and luscious Mary-Louise Parker, is a fascinating and polarizing character, rivaling Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House for protagonist of the year who’s equal parts lovable and antagonizing. Nancy is reckless, impulsive, manipulative, selfish, and concurrently fiercely protective and woefully negligent of her children. She may have started out as a good-intentioned but naive housewife who puts family first, but as the series has grown progressively darker and more dubious, so too has Nancy’s motives and morality. She is a sexy enigma with terrible judgment and even worst taste in men… and you just want to keep watching her do her thing.

Weeds is not without its flaws. The show is occasionally preachy (with a heavy liberal bias), and it has the tendency to cast aside superb supporting characters, while leaving others, like Kevin Nealon’s slacker CPA Doug, floundering in later seasons. And if you were to take the word of Weeds as gospel, you’d believe that marijuana is harmless entertainment with inescapable ties to more sinister crimes (arguably true), and you’d believe that everyone in law enforcement and government is a greedy, corrupt bastard, which is also arguably true. And to think that Weeds markets itself as a satire and not a documentary.