Like its stable-mate The L Word, a TV show like Weeds is fundamentally political. It follows the life of an attractive, suburban "soccer-mom" - Nancy - who just happens to be a drug dealer. By taking a sympathetic stance on Nancy's career, it effectively takes sides on a whole raft of issues related to America's highly politicized "War On Drugs". However, when the final episode of the oh-too-short* Season 1 launched into what can only be described as a 'rant' on George W Bush's foreign and security policy, even we didn't know where to look.

Although Rupert Murdoch's Great Marketing Machine In The SKY (TM) originally wanted to persuade us that Weeds was another Desperate Housewives (a show about which we had very mixed feelings), we decided to watch anyway, and we are glad we did - for us, it has been the TV event of the year, getting everything right that the saga of Wysteria Lane got so very wrong.

The lead characters were sympathetic, and retained a sense of ambiguity. The mom who takes out her frustrations on her ten-year-old daughter - replacing her sweets with laxatives because she isn't thin enough to get a decent man - retains some degree of sympathy because she is trying to help her offspring avoid her own fate of a loveless marriage to a mid-level asshole. The show is also consistently funny - the daughter finally responds to the aforementioned by becoming a lesbian, thus negating the need for said man!

Finally, Weeds retained a sense of believability which was missing from Desperate Housewives - from the sets, where even the posh suburban houses retained a sense of grim "normality", right through to the dialog, which (being a cable show) was not constrained by what we in the UK would term 'the watershed', but also won-out because it was not afraid to throw-in (non 'watershed') slang and a variety of accents, which meant that the African-American characters actually sounded vaguely like the African-Americans we knew when we lived in the US.

And it was partly because the series as a whole was so tightly written that the anti-Bush speech, made by one of the central characters in the final episode, seemed so out of place - as if a bear with a blunt instrument and a very sore head had suddenly been let loose upon the script. We also felt slightly embarrassed - this may just be because we are English, but we don't do politics in public, however implicit it may be as we walk around with a copy of The Guardian in our pocket, and we don't expect other people to either.

On a more practical level, it probably damaged their cause on the political right more than it upped their street-cred on the left, and we are fairly sure that fewer people will tune into Season 2 because of it. Which is a pity - Weeds was great TV… but it really should have left its politics at the door.

* Just 10 half-hour episodes - we are promised more for Season 2!