TV Finally Figured Out Women Like to Smoke Weed, Too

Presenting the rise of the female-driven stoner comedy.


It's as cliché as a spinning copy of Variety is to stories of old Hollywood lore: You may know nothing else about a certain movie or TV show, but all it takes is a frame of a few friends relaxing with a perfectly rolled splif or all smiles as they're surrounded by smoke and you immediately dub the project a pot comedy.

But despite all the impact comedies like Up in Smoke, Pineapple Express and even That '70s Show have on this genre of pop culture, there is usually a major component missing from these scenes: anyone with two "x" chromosomes.

There are rare standouts—think Anna Faris' 2007 movie Smiley Face, but less the Showtime comedy Weeds, where caffeine was the drug of choice for Mary-Louise Parker's Prius-driving pot dealer, Nancy Botwin—but it wasn't really until recently that mainstream society has accepted that it's OK to laugh about female stoners.

A lot of debt for this change can obviously be paid to the dearly departed The Sarah Silverman Program or Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer's Broad City, on which drug use is more of a character trait or intertwined naturally with other storylines. But neither of those Comedy Central series are as blatant about it as a new MTV comedy that is literally called Mary + Jane. Created by Can't Hardly Wait's Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont who executive produce with none other than Snoop Dogg, the new series, which premieres September 5, stars Scout Durwood and Jessica Rothe as two Los Angeles-based besties (named neither Mary nor Jane) who run a pot delivery service with that name.

"We originally wrote that script two years ago, kind of like when it seemed like, in our neighborhood, there were dispensaries popping up on every block," says Elfont. "What we started reading was that [pot delivery] was kind of a female-dominated space… This was one way to do a female funny comedy, but also as we started doing research there are some female services. This makes sense. Who would you want showing up at your door at night? Some shady dude or an attractive young woman?"

We started reading was that [pot delivery] was kind of a female-dominated space. This makes sense. Who would you want showing up at your door at night? Some shady dude or an attractive young woman?

It's interesting that Elfont says this, as his and Kaplan's show is not the only new pot-themed series on TV this fall. On September 16, HBO will air its adaptation of married writing partners' Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair's web series, High Maintenance, in which the latter plays a bearded hipster biking around New York to deliver the green goodness to a host of eccentric personalities.

But both shows are premiering as more and more female comedians are beginning to get recognized for something that's long been associated with acts from male counterparts as different as Robin Williams to Lord Buckley. Margaret Cho is developing her own pot comedy for Amazon, which also has The Marijuana Show, a reality competition show co-produced by Karen Paull and Wendy Robbins that has been dubbed "Shark Tank for Ganjapreneurs." Roseanne Barr has invested in a dispensary. Silverman became a trending topic at the 2014 Emmys not so much because she won for outstanding writing in a variety special for her HBO special, We Are Miracles, but because she showed red carpet cameras the marijuana pipe in her purse. Jenny Slate was the first guest on notorious toker Doug Benson's podcast, Getting Doug with High.

All of this is helping to bash the long-held stereotype that has spawned many a think piece about women's ambivalence toward weed or whether they feel they'll be persecuted if they fess up to using it. And these shows' real-world impacts may be seen in the voting turnouts for the many states considering marijuana reform laws this November.

Comedy Central

Broad City's Glazer was in production and unable to talk to Esquire for this story. But last spring when she was promoting her Comedy Central movie Time Traveling Bong (description self-explanatory), she told The Verge, "I like the idea that women carry their own weed and buy their own weed. I like that, because it's me."

"The conversation changes so much so fucking quickly in the zeitgeist," she continues:

When we first came out, it was like, "Man, these girls blaze!" And now it's like not that. It's something else. Maybe people are used to it. But it's always been real to me. The same with the way we talk about sex. The same with gross-out humor. Everybody shits. Everybody fucks and talks about it. I mean, at least in New York. And everybody blazes. I'm a limited reservoir. There's only so much for me to draw on, and that's what I relate to. Some people reflect on other experiences. But who am I? I'm somebody who writes. I'm somebody who fucks. And weed is a big part of it.

For Mary + Jane, the creators say they wanted to expand the boundaries of what characters on a pot comedy could be, not just with leads but with their customers as well.

"We had to make sure the girls were complete characters and were individuals and different from each other but you believe that they were friends—all of that stuff," says Elfont. "But we also wanted to make sure the customers that they're selling to weren't the typical stoners either."


Intermixed with jokes about delivering to Hollywood royalty (*cough*Brangelina*cough*) and feuds with a competitor who thinks to send product to Seth Rogen in the characters' quest to become the "great ganjapreneurs of the east side" are stories about celebrating the crap you're likely to do as a cool, relatable 20-something living in a major city. Via the minds of the Mary + Jane writers, this includes three ways, having a dog named Daniel Day-Lewis, and eating at a restaurant that only serve dry toast.

"We wanted to stay away from that Cheech and Chong stereotype," says Kaplan. "And not because we don't owe to them, but because there are people from all walks of life who consume cannabis for different reasons and it's no longer just that one specific lane. The show should work for people who just want to watch a good story about two young women who want to figure shit out and run their own business."

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