Go off into the weed with pot comedy
“Disjointed” is an enjoyable mess, available Friday, Aug. 25, on Netflix, that probably makes more sense if you’re stoned, which would be appropriate for a comedy about an older Jewish woman who owns a medicinal marijuana store in Los Angeles.
Kathy Bates stars as Ruth Whitefeather Feldman, who was a pot advocate for years before she opened Ruth’s Alternative Care with her recent college graduate son, Travis (Aaron Moten). The other budtenders include modernday hippie Pete (Dougie Baldwin); Jenny (Elizabeth Ho), who lies to her Chinese mother about her job; and Olivia (Elizabeth Alderfer), who is distinguished from the other two staff members by the fact that she doesn’t seem stoned all the time. Also on the staff is military veteran Carter (Tone Bell), who suffers from PTSD and serves as the store’s security guard.
Chris Redd and Betsy Sodaro play Dank and Dabby, a pair of completely unhinged Internet stars who are regular patrons of the dispensary; Nicole Sullivan is Maria, an overstressed mom who wan-
dered into the store one day thinking pot might offer relief and seems to never have left; and Michael Trucco is Tae Kwon Doug, who runs a martial arts studio next door, has no use for a pot dispensary in the neighborhood and is given to all sorts of malaprops with sexual connotations he never gets.
There isn’t much of a plot, although there are occasional moments that do seem to be circling some kind of story line. Olivia and Travis flirt here and there, Pete thinks his pot plants are talking to him, Jenny breaks out in song at one point and imagines she’s singing in a nightclub, and Travis wants his mother to adopt more pragmatic management techniques, such as putting her money in a bank and not in the ceiling.
It’s not just that the show, created by Chuck Lorre and David Javerbaum, lacks a story arc, at least anything that’s apparent in the four nonsequential episodes made available for review, but that there really are only spotty suggestions of a situation within each episode.
And yet, it’s often funny, and many of the characters are oddly appealing — or just appealingly odd — and the rest are at least have amusing moments. A little of Pete, Jenny and Tae Kwon Doug goes a very long way, but most of the focus is on Ruth, Travis and Olivia, with off-the-wall moments for Dank and Dabby.
Many times, the best parts of each episode are the fake pot commercials, including a hilarious ad with dancing cannabis containers all shot in glorious 1950s’ black and white.
And in further conscious defiance of logical episodic structure, there are even a few sophisticated animation sequences, including one representing the torment of Carter’s mind.
If you do watch the show stoned, you’ll laugh. But then again, if you watch Wolf Blitzer stoned, you’ll probably laugh, too. The rest of us can enjoy a contact high. This isn’t primo TV, but it’s also not stems and seeds.
Go ahead: Inhale.