Kurt Sutter made his bones as writer/producer for FX’s leftfield cop drama The Shield, and that alone is enough to make me climb on board his new FX motorcycle gang show, The Sons of Anarchy (TNT, Wednesday, 10:00 PM). The guy has yet another secret weapon going for him--his real life wife Katey Sagal (Married with Children) is present front and center, flaming it on as the gang’s resident Lady MacBeth. Equally surprising is the presence of both Drea de Matteo (The Sopranos) as the junky ex-wife of the show’s central figure alongside Maggie Siff (Mad Men), playing an ex-lover/Doctor, two other strong female characters embedded in a macho universe. The golden boy, and the one biker with a budding conscience is Jax, charismatically inhabited by Charlie Hunnan, cut straight outta the Heath Ledger mode. While the show’s premise, 60’s hippie bikers-turned-outlaw slash combination small town kingpins and watchdogs, is slightly outlandish, but the biker saga boasts a host of cool daddy character types including Ron Pearlman (Hellboy), Dayton Callie (Deadwood), Mitch Pilliegi (The X-Files), Mark Boone Jr. (Trees Lounge) and tough guys Kim Coates and Tommy Flanagan. You can’t overlook the show’s ambitions either, delving straight into the same territory as The Shield and even The Sopranos, dancing on the line between morality and amorality, navigating through the codes (said and unsaid) of a closed society, and shining a shaky light on the nuts and bolts of good ol' American capitalism. This one has potential.
1 comment:
I tuned into this one, thinking the same stuff, but found the characters unlikable and cartoonish. And the show is boring. It seems mostly to me like mostly a bunch of stupid macho swaggering without much of anything happening. They're all such selfish assholes, I wish they'd all got to jail, where they can bore the other inmates. And Sagal as Lady Macbeth? Ha! Try low-budget Alexis Carrington. Jacks and Drea are the only interesting characters in this snoozefest, but their limited interaction can't save this dog. Thank God Pushing Daisies is back on Wednesday night.
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