Toward the end of the first season of Weeds, an episode begins in a rather extraordinary manner: With a close-up of an Orthodox rabbi chanting a Hebrew prayer. The camera quickly moves to the gravestone, engraved with a Magen David.

The body in the grave is Judah Botwin, late husband of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), the pot-dealing, mildly psychotic mom around whom the show revolves. She stands alongside the grave, with sons Shane and Silas, and her brother-in-law, Andy, all of them looking mildly uncomfortable in the crystalline California sunshine and inappropriately dressed for a religious ritual. Judah died-a heart attack during his morning run-sometime in the nebulous past, before the start of the show. His death sent the family into financial ruin and Nancy into her new, er, career path-so this clearly isn't his funeral, but, as any Jewish viewer instantly realizes, his unveiling. The other 98 percent of the population, well, who knows what they made of this scene, because-and here's what makes the scene and Weeds, in general, so brilliant-the writers refrain from explicating it until midway through the episode, when Nancy meets Peter Scottson, the DEA agent whom she eventually marries, at a karate tournament in which Shane is competing. Their 'meet cute' is Nancy explaining why Shane went crazy and bit Peter's son while screaming the sh'ma. "We just came from his father's unveiling," she rambles, in classic Mary-Louise Parker intonations. "Do you know what that is? It's where they unveil the gravestone. It's a Jewish thing. I know you're thinking, ‘She doesn't look Jewish.' I come from Welsh stock...I'm not Jewish. My husband. He's dead now. He was Jewish. "

Though the show is over-the-top and even cartoonish in its coverage of topics from evangelical Christianity to casual sex, when it comes to things Jewish, Weeds tends toward the subtlety, irreverence, and occasional iconoclasm of real life. Rather than over-explaining-or apologizing for-the inclusion of a not-immediately-recognizable religious ritual, Jenji Kohan and her team of smart writers allow the story to unfold as if unveilings-and, later, rabbinical school, the IDF, circumcision, Yiddish, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a host of other Jewish ideas and references-are as much a part of mainstream American life as, well, watching television. And that in and of itself-the lovely casualness with which the Botwin's Jewishness (or lack of it) is simply a part of the texture of their lives-makes Weeds unusual in the deracinated world of the cathode ray tube.

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