Rating: B/B-

I work from home most of the week and Fridays it can be a struggle getting through the day. What’s surprisingly helped is putting on a TV show that I’m mildly interested in, but normally wouldn’t watch in my spare time. And that’s how I plowed through seven mostly okay seasons of Sons of Anarchy on Netflix.

Sons of Anarchy was created by Kurt Sutter, who was a writer and cast member on The Shield, an excellent early FX show about crooked cops in California. Sons of Anarchy has a similar gritty feel and look, though it’s more lighthearted at times and nowhere near as good. The show peaks early with two very good seasons, three mostly enjoyable seasons, and then two fairly bad seasons with an alright ending.

The show primarily follows Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam), the Vice President of the Redwood Original branch of the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club. His deceased father founded the club and his stepfather Clay Morrow (played by Ron Perlman) is currently the president. Decades after the club was founded under hippy-ish anarchistic ideals, they now make their money running guns imported by the IRA, which seems kind of random.

This is kind of like grimy version of Hamlet, with some Greek tragedy thrown in, and by the end of the first episode it’s pretty clear that Jax’s father was likely killed by his mother Gemma (Katey Sagal in one of the show’s best roles) and Clay because he wanted to get the club away from guns. That tension drives the show, along with Jax trying to push the club into more legitimate business vs. Clay pushing further into illegal territory to make more money.

The other source of tension early on is Jax becoming a father and having to quickly mature from a party boy outlaw. While married, his wife Wendy is a drug addict and overdoses causing her child to be born prematurely. The baby’s alright, his soon-to-be ex wife goes off to rehab for a few seasons, and Jax reconnects with Dr. Tara Knowles (Maggie Siff), a former high school flame recently back in town for mysterious reasons.

Tara sticks around for the long haul, and I liked how she was not the typical antihero wife character. The early part of the show uses her as the audience’s look into how the club works. While it still sucks that we don’t have a show like this that’s not all just dudes doing bad stuff, it is nice that Jax and Tara develop this equal partnership and both Tara and Jax’s mother are quite involved with the club.

The show does its share of objectifying of women to be sure, but it also does a surprisingly solid job of validating sex workers and portraying them as fleshed-out women (i.e. Lyla).  Characters who try to slut shame on the show are generally called out on their bullshit, and the later seasons do a lot to promote the advantages of legalizing prostitution.

Of course, what the show does best and makes it very watchable is the big focus on action. These dudes are always getting into lengthy car chases and gun fights. The show borders on a parody of the antihero genre at times due to its massive body count. I looked it up and it’s like 150+ people get killed on the show with Jax killing about a third of them.

Most of the seasons involve the club trying to deal with various levels of law enforcement, plus rival gangs in town usually with one other group trying to rise to the top. The best of which is in season 2 where the club is trying to outrun both this ruthless ATF agent and dealing with a vicious white supremacist group featuring Henry Rollins of all people (Marilyn Manson and Courtney Love also make appearances in the last season).

On that last note, one of the best parts of the show is its cast. Sons of Anarchy fills out its sprawling cast with tons of great character actors and notables from lots of solid shows. You’ll encounter prominent actors from the Sopranos, Mad Men, the X-Files, Deadwood, Lost, and pretty much the entire cast of the Shield. Best of which is a reoccurring part for Walton Goggins as a transgender woman that seems to start as a grotesque joke, but actually sets up this touching and oddly beautiful story about acceptance and the romance between one of the sons and this woman. The social issues on the show are fairly clumsy, but the show does seem to steer these semi-racist, mostly white, womanizers towards acceptance.  

It’s a heavily serialized show, but it’s less Breaking Bad and more Gossip Girl. SoA is all about constantly shifting alliances and the same groups fighting all the time. The sons might be aligned with the Latino group one week and the next they’re enemies. After awhile it was kind of pointless to keep track of all the constant entanglements.

This is largely the result of the show increasingly dragging out the main storylines. Starting at the end of season 2, they start dropping a shocker in the last episode that becomes the plot of the next season and doesn’t get resolved until the end. That forces them to deal with all these shifting alliances during the middle parts. As the show goes on, the episodes get longer and longer too leading to more foot dragging.

The other major issue with the later seasons is the show gets increasingly full of itself. Even in the beginning, you could tell Kurt Sutter just thought he was writing the most beautiful shit ever about these guys, instead of a fairly trashy show, but later on is just full of anguish and long stares and pretentious dialogue. This also goes hand-in-hand with the show getting increasingly violent and gory. You reach this point where the show wants you to love these people, but you realize they’re all these horrible mass murders and you just kind of want them all to die.

Season six and seven are a real slog, though the show never becomes totally unwatchable. Five seasons would probably been enough for all the story they wanted to tell, though at least the last few episodes are pretty enjoyable and wrap up everything decently. At the end, the show seems to finally come to terms with what it is and that helps to make the last episode feel fairly satisfactory.  

So yeah, this is a show that peaked early with the potential for greatness and continued on for seven seasons thinking it was better than the Wire, at least in my opinion. It’s easily watchable for the most part, though I’m not sure if I’d recommend it as anything more than a solid show you put in the background while doing other stuff. At least don’t watch this until you’ve seen the Sopranos, the Shield, the Wire, and Breaking Bad.

-James P.