In the new FX drama Sons of Anarchy (Wednesdays, 10 p.m.), a group of tough, macho guys work and hang out together, doing their intense, sometimes violent jobs while dressed in similar outfits declaring their affiliations. The women mostly watch from the sidelines, occasionally worming their way into some task the men need to pull off, but generally just trying to make sure that their marriages and families don’t fall apart.
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Sound familiar? It’s a proven formula for success for FX with shows like Rescue Me and The Shield, but here the look into a masculine inner sanctum finds a subject a little less common on TV than firefighters and cops: Anarchy is about the titular motorcycle gang, a rough-and-tumble group of semi-likable thugs who have a tight grip on the criminal underworld of the fictional central California town of Charming (such clever irony!). The Sons are about as amoral and corrupt as the cops on The Shield, for which Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter was a writer and producer, and probably a little more casual in their attitudes toward things like murder.
But this isn’t exactly a show about sociopathic criminals. No, lead character Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) is actually quite a good-hearted fellow, the son of the gang’s late co-founder, and he seems rather uneasy with all the killing and the gun-running and the turf wars with rival gangs of Mexicans and white supremacists. He’s just become a father to a struggling preemie, and he even holds out compassion for the child’s mother, his drug-addicted ex-wife Wendy (Drea de Matteo).
In other words, he’s kind of a downer, and while he serves well as the show’s moral compass, it’s far more entertaining to watch Ron Perlman as Jax’s opposite number in the Sons, club president Clay Morrow. Clay co-founded the club with Jax’s dad and is now married to Jax’s mom, Jemma (Katey Sagal). Perlman brings all of his deep-voiced charm to the menacingly low-key Clay, but it’s Sagal who completely steals the show as the Lady Macbeth-like Jemma. She’s all love and compassion to Jax’s face, but behind the scenes she tries to kill Wendy by hand-delivering her a syringe full of meth in the hospital, rifles through Jax’s stuff so she can destroy the old journals of his father’s that are putting those unfortunate pacifist ideas in his head and not-so-subtly threatens the wife of another club member who is considering going straight.
Jemma is the Vic Mackey or Tommy Gavin of this show, and it’s a shame that she isn’t the main character. Sagal gives her both a cool danger and a genuine sadness, and that conflict is much more interesting than Jax’s bland desire to do right by his father and be a stand-up guy. As a crime show, Anarchy is passable but not all that exciting; the Sons deal in simple, crude operations, not intricate heists, and the show sometimes seems to be trying too hard to highlight their violence and callousness, primarily to contrast it to Jax’s growing objections.
Anarchy does seem to have more mileage in it than other recent FX launches, though; its nearly Shakespearean family drama has plenty of potential for long-term intrigue, even if the gang’s machinations seem likely to get old quickly. More importantly, it’s focused more on building a tapestry of characters than on holding up a flimsy high concept (à la The Riches or Dirt), and in that sense it may one day deserve the comparisons it invites to FX’s past drama powerhouses.
The bottom line: ***
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