As federal and state governments continue to wrestle with the realities of legalizing marijuana for recreational use, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that no one stopped to think about the most wide-reaching consequence of readily available, legal weed: its effect on TV studios and the comedy writers who feed their script-hungry mouths. We’ve already reported on The Big Bang Theory’s Chuck Lorre and his efforts to get a new weed comedy on the air, but now there’s a veritable greenrush of pot-based shows in the works, all looking to tap into the dank, funk-heavy zeitgeist.
Joining the pack: Writer, director, and marijuana expert—in that he’s smoked a ridiculous amount of it, by his own admission—Kevin Smith, who’s just finished shooting on a pilot for a TV series titled Hollyweed. (Those in the audience with a low tolerance for weed puns should probably head to the chill-out tent and avoid TV news for the next year or so.) Like pretty much all these projects—Lorre’s show, Adam Scott’s Buds, Margaret Cho’s Highlands—Smith’s series will take place at a pot dispensary, because even when it gets mildly transgressive, TV can’t resist the lure of the workplace comedy.
Smith’s show stars himself as a clerk at a pot store, who teams up with Chappelle’s Show’s Donnell Rawlings to battle a “neighboring cookie magnate” with the help of a friendly porn star played by Mr. Robot’s Frankie Shaw. Unsurprisingly, given that he’s Kevin Smith, the filmmaker went non-traditional with his business model for the pilot, shooting it on spec, with funding coming from various pot-friendly businesses like Weedmaps and vaporiser manufacturer G-Pen. Smith is now shopping the series around, in a crowded market that’s suddenly just as supply-heavy as the one he and his fellow pot-scribes are hoping to capture and comment on in their works.