If you’re looking to get high, veg out, and watch TV, the new web series “Baked Goodes” might be just the right kind of cute, light-hearted comedy for the occasion.
In the show, cousins Julie and Angela Goode aim to reinvigorate their failing bakery business with an herbal pick-me-up. The series tracks the characters’ progress and own personal relationships to weed, as they get comfortable with the idea of selling pot brownies even though it’s federally illegal, while learning more about cannabis along the way. With the help of their older stoner neighbor Jan, Julie and Angela navigate their new business model and the trials and tribulations of branding, PR, accidentally dosing Grandpa, and managing mishaps with LA’s A-list celebrity clients.
The all-female-produced series launched on 4/20, and will release all 13 episodes by the end of May.
“The series is aimed at dismissing the traditional stoner culture, while reclaiming weed culture for this group of women as something that isn’t the traditional stereotype,” says director Anna Mehle. The character Julie, for instance, starts out very reticent about getting involved with weed at all, grappling with her religious upbringing and the gray-area illegality of selling pot brownies. “She knows nothing about weed, and nothing about weed culture, while her cousin Angela is a little more well-versed. Then Jan is the stoner neighbor. What we want to do is have various women at different states with their relationship to weed and watch how that develops in relationship to the business.”
The characters’ varying relationships to weed also reflect the series’ creators own varied backgrounds with cannabis. “Of the five of us, I’m the most well-versed. We had other people in the group who had never smoked weed before or been around it, so I found that in the writing room, I was doing some educating on marijuana and weed culture, ” says co-producer Caryn Ruby, who plays Jan.
In one episode, for instance, the characters use CBD to market to a group of PTA moms, implicitly educating them about the benefits of the non-psychotropic chemical compound. “CBD is something that helps bring in people who traditionally would be anti-drug or anti-marijuana,” says Ruby. “We talk a lot about medicine in the series. There’s so much cannabis can help with, so we wanted to make it about that as well, instead of getting high, sitting on the couch, and eating munchies.”
In addition to portraying different levels of cannabis connaissance, the show’s creators also wanted to portray different types of women. “We were big on promoting women and promoting different ages of women,” says Mehle. The creators also made a point to show conversations among women about topics other than men. “We see how women are portrayed in film, often times as just the hot girl number whatever and they don’t have lines. We tried to flip that, and a lot of our guy characters are hot guy number one,” adds Ruby.
“One thing I’ve noticed for many years is that the advertisements for a medical marijuana doctor to get your recommendation here in California included the sexy nurse uniforms,” she says. “It used to really aggravate me. I’m using it as medicine, and the way a lot of people traditionally advertise marijuana to the masses does not do a service to women. They’re leaving out a whole bunch of people who might be interested in it. The stoner lazy hungry dude sitting on the couch and the hot sexy nurses, that’s not the reality of what the world is or could be with weed.”
