Sons of Anarchy

Kurt Sutter’s series is about a motorcycle club in Charming, a small town in northern California, that runs guns and in return keeps the place free of chain stores, drug dealers and outsiders. Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) is the club’s vice-president. In the first episode he finds a manuscript by his dead father, one of the founders, arguing that the Sons were meant to be better than this, and he reads it while his mother Gemma (Katey Sagal) and her second husband Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), the president, watch him with alarm. The shape is Hamlet. It first aired on 3 September 2008 and ran for seven seasons and ninety-two episodes; the first three are good crime drama and the last four are the same drama, repeated.

The pleasures are the parents. Sagal plays Gemma as the woman who actually runs Charming, handling the club’s laundry and its cover-ups in the same tone, and she can make a hand on a daughter-in-law’s shoulder feel like a threat. Perlman’s Clay has arthritis in both hands and is doing the arithmetic on how long a president can still ride, and the fear under the swagger is the best thing in the series. Around them the club is well drawn: Mark Boone Junior’s Bobby, the sensible one; Kim Coates’s Tig, whose oddities get most of the laughs; Tommy Flanagan’s Chibs, who talks like Glasgow and fights like it. Ryan Hurst’s Opie, out of prison and trying to go straight for a wife tired of waiting, is the one who got to us. He barely speaks. He stands in his kitchen with a coffee mug while the club pulls at one arm and his family at the other, and that big silent man moved us more than any speech the show wrote.

It looks right. Paul Maibaum, Edward J. Pei and Jonathan Freeman shoot Charming in hard flat daylight with no shade in it and light the clubhouse so low that faces float above the table. The rides are filmed from a car alongside, bikes two by two on empty road, and the series never gets them wrong. Sidney Wolinsky and Hunter M. Via cut nearly every episode towards a closing montage, a slow cover of an old song over faces in cars and at the bar; it works the first dozen times and is a formula by the thirtieth. Paris Barclay, who also produces, keeps his episodes moving; Peter Weller, Adam Arkin and Allen Coulter take turns; Sutter directs some himself.

The trouble is at the centre. Hunnam is handsome and watchful and rides well, but Jax is written as the wisest man in every room, and Hunnam cannot always make the wisdom sound like his own. His Californian vowels wander, and when the script hands him his father’s philosophy to read aloud he delivers it like a man reading. Maggie Siff, as Tara Knowles, the doctor who left town to get away from him and has come back, is steadily better than what she is given.

Then there is the pattern. Each season an outside force arrives, a rival club, a federal agent, an Irish connection; somebody at the table is suspected of talking; Gemma keeps a secret that would end everything; the club votes. Season 4 runs to fourteen episodes and needs about nine. By the sixth season we knew the shape of an episode before the credits ran, and we were irritated at being able to guess, because the actors deserved surprises. The violence rises with the episode count. Early on it is quick, ugly and has consequences; later a torture scene turns up where a plot point should be, and the camera stays.

The Sopranos knew Tony was a bad man and let us like him anyway. The Shield knew Vic Mackey was a villain from the first hour. Sutter never decides whether the Sons are heroes or criminals, and in the early seasons that is the drama, because Jax cannot decide either. Later it is an excuse. The show keeps calling the club a family, keeps showing the family doing things no family should survive, and asks us to forgive it because the music is sad.

The first three seasons are tense, funny and properly acted, and earn their 15 certificate. Stop at the end of the third. Everything after it is the same season with more funerals.