Showtime is planning to revive two of its past hits. Nurse Jackie and Weeds have revivals in the works, with respective stars Edie Falco and Mary-Louise Parker attached to return.
Deadline reports that Showtime is prepping revivals of both series, with their original stars not only attached to star but to executive produce. The Weeds revival will feature the main character Nancy Botwin (Parker) in Copenhagen, where marijuana remains illegal, but its sale and use is reluctantly tolerated in the community of Freetown Christiania.
The revival will be produced by Christian Torpe, creator of the popular Danish comedy-drama series Rita. There are no plot details yet on the Nurse Jackie revival, but Deadline reports that Abe Sylvia (Dead to Me, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and Liz Flahive (Roar, Homeland) who worked on the original series, will write and executive produce. The moves reflect Showtime’s strategy since its merger with Paramount Plus; they have begun to aggressively exploit their back catalog of shows, planning to expand both Dexter and Billions into franchises.
Jackie Payton and Nancy Botwin: Showtime’s Complicated Women
Debuting in 2009 and continuing for 7 seasons and 80 episodes, Nurse Jackie depicted the life of Jackie Payton (Falco), a New York City nurse with a complicated personal life and a troublesome prescription drug habit.
Coming off her successful run on The Sopranos, Falco’s performance was well-received and was nominated for an Emmy six times, winning once. Weeds, created by Jenji Kohan (Orange is the New Black, GLOW), starred Parker as Nancy Botwin, an upper-middle-class suburbanite whose life is thrown into chaos when her husband suddenly dies. To maintain her lifestyle, she starts dealing marijuana, drawing her into a world of crime and deceit. Debuting in 2005, it ran for eight seasons and 102 episodes.
The series finale flashed forward to the then-future year of 2022, depicting where the various characters had gone in their lives over a seven-year time jump; it is unclear whether the revival will take that into account. Parker enjoyed playing Botwin, and when asked in a Collider interview if she missed the character, she said “I do! It’s pathetic, but I do. It was eight years of my life, you know?”
Falco is famed for her powerful performances on Broadway and in The Sopranos, Oz, and Impeachment: American Crime Story. She recently starred in Avatar: The Way of Water (but don’t ask her when it came out), and can currently be seen playing Pete Davidson‘s mother on Bupkis.
Also an accomplished stage actor, Parker also starred in Fried Green Tomatoes, Bullets Over Broadway, and the action movie RED and its sequel, RED 2. She recently played Colin Kaepernick‘s mother, Teresa, on Colin in Black and White.
Stay tuned to Collider for future updates, and check out the trailer for Falco’s Bupkis below.