You know…I think I SAW that episode! 
No doubt. 
I’ve been impressed with the extent that Weeds seems to tear up the rule book, shift location, remove and introduce some major parts, and alter character perspectives over time. It could very easily have taken a more conservative approach, and been a less interesting show for it.
Like the homeless guy who lived in a box? The Cuban couple on a raft? The charity case with the facial tumor? Cuddy’s fix-it guy? All the others that are so poor they live in dumps that gross out the ducklings when they search their houses for bad stuff?
The rest of your post is similarly skewed.
I take it you’ve only seen a couple episodes of the show.
I think the original Law & Order shows are great at staying in format, generally, and they have also used the breaking of that format to great effect. The best example of the “out of comfort zone” episodes is “Aftershock,” which follows the main characters as they react to watching a Bad Guy’s execution. Part of what made L&O different from other shows when it was new is that it generally stayed away from the main characters’ personal lives, but this episode was almost nothing BUT personal lives. It was pretty powerful, and it ends with a car accident that kills one of the main characters.
Most mornings, TNT shows 2 episodes of Angel. Of course I watch them–or the first one–while getting ready for my day. Even though I’ve seen them before numerous times & have the DVD’s.
Just recently, they showed “Smile Time”–the hilarious puppet episode. Followed by “A Hole In The World”–which is definitely not hilarious.
I remember “Aftershock.” One of the two best L&O’s better, matched by its sort-of follow-up the next season, in which
McCoy, grieving over the character who died in “Aftershock” (Claire) goes overboard while prosecuting a drunk driver for murder.
That was the best thing about L&O at its height. Even though we only ever see the characters at work, their private lives aren’t irrelevant a la “Dragnet”; rather, the viewer is allowed to infer what’s going on and use his or her own imagination, which is quite inteesting. Even though it’s never explicitly stated that
Claire
dies in “Aftershock,” and the name is mentioned only once (by the one character who never met the dead one, it’s clear that the other characters’ grief and guilt is the emotional subtext driving the story.
I love Angel and both of those episodes, but I’m not sure either story really counts as leaving the comfort zone. Angel was all about mocking its characters, in a universe that was nevertheless extremely grim and resolutely unjust, from the very first episode.
That scene choked me up. The entire show up to that point had been almost uniformly silly and light-hearted–indeed, that particular episode had been light-hearted and silly up to that point (IIRC)–and then, all of a sudden, it was intensely sad. And yet I don’t feel that that scene was somehow out of place or wasn’t in keeping with the tone of the rest of the series.