village voice > screens > This Is Your Mom on Drugs - by Joy Press: I'd watch Mary-Louise Parker in almost anything, though I know that her performances (most recently, the disintegrating Mormon housewife in Angels in America hmm? and Josh's feminist foil on The West Wing) tend to wring extreme love-hate reactions from audiences. Parker has a crumbly quality that suggests she's mustering all of her energy to maintain her deadpan composure—something that works perfectly for the character of Nancy. She joins Lorelai Gilmore, the wisecracking mom of the Gilmore Girls, as one of the most flawed, fascinating women on TV, a fuck-you to the retro conservatism of Wisteria Lane.

yeah that quality of being ~ fragile . and deadpan. there's something about her that is so much less familiar than Lorelai to me.
I am thinking, with Lorelai you see her thinking about things more? more cerebral. seems odd today since people suppose she is flightly and immature. which anyway I mostly do not see. and cerebral might be right. or, like me? in suffusing what she says with her own understanding and feelings about it?
whereas - I just watched the first half of Weeds season 2 - Nancy Botwin is enigmatic to me. is she? or maybe, more surprisingly flawed?
there's something to do with race here, too, and maybe with being the central character whose perspective therefore seems like it should be available to me. she keeps not acting (is this right -) like I expect a white woman to act - she does not modify her behavior to fit the circumstance, to not rock the boat. she's maybe a little outrageous, and it does not seem strategic. just, like her behaving like herself I guess. which, I am thinking, maybe I don't surprise at, when watching someone who I do not expect to identify with.

her expressions do sometimes look like Lorelai. and, I like how she like Lorelai calls her child her "kid" - "you hit my kid?!"