Sons of Acceptability
Dramatic series on FX have a clear mandate: Be slightly more intelligent, violent, and sexy than most of the stuff on network TV, but slightly less intelligent, violent, and sexy than most of the stuff on HBO. Some of FX’s series hit that mark with gusto (The Shield, Damages), some have sadly lost their way (Nip/Tuck), and some are just another opportunity for Denis Leary to play a blue-collar public servant who drinks too much and bangs a lot of hot chicks.
The new Hamlet-in-a-biker-gang series Sons of Anarchy’s first episode falls squarely in the middle of that pack: Not quite riveting, but entirely watchable, with a few welcome surprises.
Charlie Hunnam (the budget-priced Heath Ledger, and I mean that as a compliment) is Jackson “Jax” Teller, son of the dead founder of the gun-running Sons of Anarchy motorycycle club. The name “Jax” would be laughably preposterous if Jax were not also a badass dude who rides motorcycles, sports tattoos, and performs impromptu and unwanted surgery with a broken pool cue.
Since this is FX, not Fox News, Jax is also more or less a stand-up guy, looking forward to the birth of his first child (by his meth-addicted crazy ex-wife — you just know that’s gonna go well) and looking out for a fellow gang member struggling to support his family with honest, non-gun-running-or-beating-people-up work.
In the pilot, Jax must contend with his son’s premature birth and post-natal complications, all thanks to Meth Mommy’s poor sense of priorities; the theft of a crucial shipment of badass-looking guns by a rival gang that might as well be called The Stereotypical Mexicans; and his discovery of his late father’s wistful, idealistic manifesto, which apparently outlines a vision for the Sons of Anarchy that involves less gun-running and more, I dunno, hugging and talking about their feelings and stuff.
Because he’s handsome and muscular and rides a motorcycle, Jax also encounters an improbably foxy convenience-store clerk who signals her crush on him via strategic, surreptitious cleavage adjustment, and the clandestinely tattooed ex-biker chick turned doctor (the dour-yet-hot Maggie Siff) who’s helping treat his son. At one point, Doctor Trampstamp’s near-overwhelming desire to make out with Jax is doused by her realization that he’s currently covered in Mexican stereotype blood. Awkward!
For comic relief, we’ve got the club’s newest member, named “Halfsack” for his cringe-inducing Iraq War injury, chainsawing a dead deer out of a car’s windshield, and another gang member (Mark Boone Junior, the corrupt cop from Batman Begins) moonlighting as an Elvis impersonator. The latter element has the benefit of actually being funny, in no small part because that storyline involves a rival Asian Elvis impersonator who stays entirely in Southern-fried character even as he’s receiving a biker-style beatdown.
Yes, in case you mistakenly thought that a show about a gun-running motorcycle gang would be delicate and sensitive, this is a manly show about manly men. How manly? In their off hours, they get drunk, barbecue, and beat on each other bare-chested and bare-fisted until they start spontaneously hugging. Seriously, you could prescribe this show as a testosterone supplement. I think I grew a beard just watching it.
For all my mockery, the show’s really not too bad. For one thing, the casting’s pretty fantastic. Hunnam’s a solid lead, and he’s surrounded by fairly awesome folks like Boone, Ron “Hellboy” Perlman as the resoundingly criminal current leader of the gang, and Mitch Pileggi from The X-Files as the leader of the Neo-Nazi skinheads. Perlman’s always fun to watch, and his character here is not the clear-cut villain he could be; he’s secretly afraid of getting too old to ride, he fiercely protects his home town from the incursions of drug dealers, and he genuinely seems to care about Jax.
Katey Segal is particularly excellent as Jax’s mom; she’s warm and loving with him, but when she slinks off to Perlman’s bed, she suddenly becomes less Queen Gertrude and more Lady MacBeth. The striking viciousness in Segal’s character — the way the most cunning, calculated, and ruthless character in this series of macho men is a woman — is a truly excellent twist.
Weirdly enough, for a series from former Shield writer Kurt Sutter, the show takes too many easy outs to keep Jax likeable to the viewer. All the people Jax hurts, including the meth-dealing skinhead whose testicle he skewers with a pool cue, are clearly Very Bad People who Deserved What They Got. And every time Jax looks like he’ll be forced to do something genuinely horrible, a convenient coincidence keeps him just barely on the side of the angels. It’s not that the series has had its balls cut off entirely — but appropriately enough, at least one of them seems to be missing. (Seriously, what the hell kind of motif is that? Ouch.)
Still, I like the central dilemma the show’s set up for Jax: Following the lead of Perlman’s character into hardcore criminality, or drifting back toward his dad’s more peaceable but perhaps less practical vision. Between this intriguing dynamic, the uniformly fine acting, and the possibility of hot biker chicks in their underthings, I’m willing to overlook the spotty writing and give this show a shot. Just like the show’s bikers, who balance their adeptness at punching things by hacking computer databases and investigating financial records, Sons of Anarchy’s surplus of testosterone doesn’t mean it also lacks a brain.
Get your motor running and head out on the highway Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX. Broken pool cues strictly optional.
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