FX’s ’Sons of Anarchy’ Toe Familiar Lines
With the final season of The Shield now airing, Fox cable channel FX is looking for a suitable successor. Shield producer and writer Kurt Sutter’s new biker gang show Sons of Anarchy, to judge from its pilot episode (which aired Sept. 3), falls short.
British actor Charlie Hunnam, who appeared in the original U.K. version of Queer As Folk, has grown up, muscled up, and traded in his accent for an American drawl. As Jackson "Jax" Teller, Hunnam finds himself cast into the awkward role of would-be leader of the pack, a biker pup who’s just about grown into his jackboots... only, he’s starting to have doubts about the course his life is taking, having found an old manuscript by his late father. To that fresh fount of angst, add the state of his junkie ex-wife Wendy (The Sopranos’ Drea de Matteo) and his newborn son, a preemie suffering from both a congenital heart defect (it runs in the family, overt-metaphor style) and damage to his gut from his mother’s crank habit.
The characters and story lines spring directly from deeply-etched templates. The strung-out ex and sick kid are only the start: there’s also a wild-childe former flame, now a doctor, named Tara (Maggie Siff) who enters the picture to help with surgery on Jax’s ailing son and get into hospital corridor cat-fights with Jax’s Lady MacBeth of a mother, Gemma (Katey Sagal).
But MacBeth is less the classical antecedent here than another Shakespearean play, Hamlet; it seems that Gemma and her current husband, Clay (Ron Perelman) have got some secrets to keep from young Jax, including, possibly, a hinted ambiguity regarding Jax’s paternity.
Underlying Clay and Gemma’s hopes for young Jax is their conviction that the lad’s deceased dad was a sap and a weakling for having wanted to make the biker gang he founded with Clay into some sort of alternative "commune on Harleys," rather than the gun-running enterprise it has turned out to be. Scoffing at her dead husband’s having gone "soft," Gemma issues her instructions to the aging Clay: turn sonny-boy Jax into a hard man, before time (or battles with rival gang The Mayans) does its damage and takes Clay out of the saddle.
Gemma is supposed to be an epic female badass, plying Clay with oral sex and overwhelming the show’s other women with sheer, unladylike testosterone, all while lapsing into the final refuge of her gender when times get especially tough; men turn to prayer or to guns when cornered; women, including Gemma, resort to house cleaning. Gemma could have been written as more of a paradox, a powerful woman in a male-dominated sub-culture, but she comes across as the sort of bitch goddess villain who resides at the heart of daytime soap operas, though perhaps of a more venomous pedigree: as a final warning to Wendy to stay out of her son’s (and grandson’s) life, Gemma slips Wendy a loaded hypodermic.
Such touches abound: testicles are skewered, pickup-trucks burn with corpses sitting stiffly upright in the cab, fetishistic strap-up rituals take place before a tattered American flag. A show evidently meant as high drama thus lapses into high camp, and the comic relief--an Asian Elvis impersonator, for example--seems willfully surreal rather than serving as a release valve for tension that never manages to mount.
The plot is every bit as worn-out as the characters and the moldy dialogue. As old-guard players Clay and Gemma plan to whip the reluctant Jax into warrior shape, they also have to figure out how to deal with the incursions of The Mayans into their turf, with the double-dealing help of a drug-peddling, neo-Nazi biker gang led by Darby (Mitch Pileggi), an opportunist with the right clothes but no spine to speak of.
Did I mention that the California town where all this takes place is called Charming? Well, they ain’t no princes in this Charming, and if Jax is meant to become a Man on a Horse... er, make that a Hog... he’d best get to it soon before the town burns down in a firestorm of lesser clichés.
