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Welcome to How to Spend $20, BOP's look at the latest Blu-ray discs and DVDs to hit stores nationwide. This week: The latest season of Weeds may be out, but do you care? Also, Aziz Ansari shines in his first DVD comedy special.

Pick of the Week

For people who can easily pinpoint when Showtime's formerly fantastic dramedy jumped the shark: Weeds: Season Five

My my, Jenji Kohan, what in god's name have you done to your baby? What was once a snarky, smart, can't-miss comedy about a MILF who makes ends meet by dealing drugs amongst a neighborhood of Peeping Toms has been retooled as a spotty, mostly generic piece of television that is all but begging to be put out of its misery following Showtime's two-year pick up in 2008. The sixth (and final?) season airs sometime later this year.

More often than not I respect reinventions that work. When a band significantly modifies its sound for a new album, that's a good thing. If anything, it shows that the band isn't afraid to take risks, has grown some, and so on. For a TV show to do something similar, however, is a bigger battle. As is generally the case – as it is here with Weeds – the show's writers wrote themselves into a hole and had little choice but to "reinvent the universe" to give principle characters something new to do. It's an act of desperation, and no show that I follow – past or present – has ever fallen quite the way Weeds has.





Season four introduced viewers to Weeds' new home in Ren Mar, California, following spoiler alert!** Nancy Botwin's rash decision to literally burn her former neighborhood to the ground in the season three finale. **end spoiler** Because of some good casting (Albert Brooks and Julie Bowen guesting in multiple episodes) and decent storylines, I concluded that Weeds' reinvention was a good thing (with minor reservations).

Then season five set in, and I quickly realized how very wrong I was. For starters, Nancy didn't deal a single drug in season five. Instead, her character was trapped in a boring and soapy struggle that even a show like Days of our Lives wouldn't touch. Even worse, most every character – from the entire Hodes clan to Doug Wilson – has no reason to be in the show anymore. While in Agrestic they served some purpose – whether to be a foil to Nancy's character (Celia) or to display the uneven principles of a working professional (Doug) – in Ren Mar they're there because, well, Nancy is.

Just this past year, shows like Dexter and especially Mad Men ended on respective cliffhangers that in many ways can be viewed as game changers. I'm anxious to see how both programs handle the adjustments.

Disc includes: Audio commentaries, bloopers, History of Weed featurette, Yes We Cannibis featurette, Crazy Love: A Guide to the Dysfunctional Relationships of Weeds featurette, Little Titles by Jenji Kohan featurette, University of Andy featurette, Really Backstage with Kevin Nealon featurette

For people who like eating and talking about tacos and sushi: Aziz Ansari: Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening

Hardly any comedian can claim to have a year as big as Aziz Ansari, who quickly went from that funny guy you may remember from X to one of the industry's hottest commodities. He guested on Reno 911! and multiple eps of ABC's Scrubs; appeared in Funny People, I Love You, Man and Observe and Report; performed stand-up comedy across the country and, by year's end, sold three (!) projects to Judd Apatow and Universal Pictures. And let's not forget about NBC's Thursday night darling, Parks and Recreation, which in less than a year already routinely outshines the network's more established comedies. On Parks, Ansari plays series regular Tom Haverford.

Over the summer, I actually got to go to the thing that's available today in both CD and DVD formats. Taped over the summer in Los Angeles – and finally airing on Comedy Central just two days ago – Ansari's one-hour special is nonstop funny. Dudes like Dane Cook and David Cross don't hold a candle to Aziz, whose brand of comedy feasts on pop culture and the utterly insane things that happen to him daily. (His true story of being invited to Kanye's house, only to listen to the self-indulgent rapper bob his head to his own beats is a stand-out, as well as everything that went down once Aziz infiltrated his cousin Harris' study group on Facebook).

Aziz also does a mean R. Kelly, and that'll always be good for a laugh.

Disc includes: 30 minutes of extra stand-up material not used in the special

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