Sons of Anarchy Buries Its Best Ideas Under an Avalanche of Subplots

“Sons of Anarchy” ran for seven seasons on FX, from September 3, 2008 to December 9, 2014, and made a fictional town in California’s Central Valley the base of an outlaw motorcycle club that ran guns, a garage and a porn business side by side. The premise fits on a patch: the club is Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Original — SAMCRO, or Sam Crow — and the stepson being groomed to run it is the same man who wants to clean it up.

That’s the engine. What the series does with it across 92 episodes is a slower, messier question. The answer is why this review lands at 6.8 of 10.

Trailer, via FX Networks.

Jax Teller and the manifesto

Charlie Hunnam plays Jax Teller, the club’s vice president and a new father. Early in the run, Jax discovers a manifesto written by his late father, a founder of the club, and begins to question himself, his relationships and the club.

The show’s central conflict is Jax against Clay Morrow, his stepfather and the charter president. Clay likes it old school and violent. Jax wants to change how the club does business and, more ambitiously, cleanse the SAMCRO name and image.

The conflict is personal before it is institutional, which is the smartest decision Kurt Sutter made as creator. Every argument about guns or porn money is also an argument about a family.

A town, a payroll, and a police chief

Charming is fictional, but the show treats it like a place with a budget. SAMCRO operates legal and illegal businesses side by side — a garage up front, gun-running and involvement in the porn film industry behind it. Deputy Chief Hale grew up on the other side of the law from Jax, a classmate. His boss, police Chief Unser, is on the club’s payroll.

That arrangement is the series’ sharpest idea, and it is where the show’s stated themes of vigilantism and government corruption actually live. The club isn’t hiding from the law. It’s paying for part of it.

The cast around Hunnam is deep. Katey Sagal plays Gemma Teller Morrow, the matriarch whose loyalty is never neutral. Tommy Flanagan is Chibs Telford, Mark Boone Junior is Bobby Munson, Kim Coates is Tig Trager, Theo Rossi is Juice Ortiz, Dayton Callie is Unser, and David Labrava is Happy Lowman.

Labrava’s presence is worth naming. He was a real-life member of the Oakland chapter of Hells Angels, served as the show’s technical adviser, and played Happy as a recurring character. That detail does more for the show’s texture than any amount of leather on a soundstage.

What the ratings actually show

“Sons of Anarchy” was, for a stretch, the biggest thing FX had. The third season drew an average of 4.9 million weekly viewers, making it FX’s highest-rated series at the time and pushing it past The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me. The season 4 and season 5 premieres were the two highest-rated telecasts in FX’s history.

The show’s full run:

Those numbers are real, but they measure appetite, not quality. A show can be FX’s biggest and still be uneven, and this one was.

The Teller-Morrow household, and everyone it drags in

The series frames itself as the story of the Teller-Morrow family of Charming, plus SAMCRO’s members, their families, the townspeople, allied and rival gangs, and the law agencies that either undermine or support the club’s enterprises. That’s a lot of machinery, and over seven seasons it grinds.

Jax’s home life carries as much weight as his club life. He deals with his ex-wife, Wendy Case, played by Drea de Matteo, and is reunited with his high school sweetheart, Tara Knowles. Opie Winston, son of First 9 member and club adviser Piney Winston, tries to build something normal for his wife, Donna.

The show’s stated themes are love, brotherhood, loyalty, betrayal and redemption. It also explores vigilantism, government corruption and racism, and it presents the club as an analogy for human transformation.

That last claim is the one the series never quite earns. Transformation implies change that sticks. Too often, “Sons of Anarchy” mistakes escalation for growth — a body count climbing is not the same as a character arriving somewhere new.

Where the show holds and where it slips

The first season sets up a clean machine: Clay at the head, Jax as vice president, Tig as Sergeant-At-Arms, Bobby as Secretary/Treasurer, Juice as intelligence officer. Chibs, formerly of SAM-Belfast, and Half-Sack Epps, the charter’s prospect, round out the table. Deputy Chief Hale and Chief Unser sit on the other side of a line that keeps moving.

When the show keeps its scope small — a garage, a town, a family dinner that turns into a threat — it’s very good. When it stacks rival factions, it thins out. Seven seasons is a long time to sustain a story whose central question is whether a man can reform an institution he loves, and the show returns to that question often enough that the asking starts to wear.

Jimmy Smits plays Nero Padilla, and the addition keeps the back half watchable. But the show’s best asset was always its first one: the idea that the outlaw club is a family business, and family businesses don’t reform, they just change hands.

FX announced the spin-off’s development in November 2016, after the finale on December 9, 2014. That tells you what the network thought it had. It doesn’t change what the original was: a strong, frequently brutal drama with a great premise, a great cast and a habit of confusing volume for depth. Worth the ride. Not worth pretending it stuck the landing.

6.8 of 10.

Charlie Hunnam · FX · Jax Teller · Kurt Sutter · Sons of Anarchy · TV Review