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FX has announced that the network has officially ordered a third season of “Sons of Anarchy,” which will arrive in September 2010. All the series regulars will return and Kurt Sutter has signed a new 2-year deal to continue as the show’s executive producer.
Below is a feature on “Sons of Anarchy,” which has its Season 2 finale Tuesday on FX. After the story, there’s a transcript of my interview with “Sons” creator and executive producer Kurt Sutter. There are no spoilers for the Season 2 finale below. My previous “Sons of Anarchy” stories and reviews are here.
If you can look past the guns, motorcycles and leather jackets on “Sons of Anarchy” (9 p.m. Central Tuesday, FX), you can discern a story of idealism colliding with reality. The collision in the show’s 90-minute Season 2 finale Tuesday promises to be especially brutal.
“Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter, an actor and writer who received his master’s degree in fine arts from Northern Illinois University, had long been fascinated by outlaw motorcycle clubs, and when he began researching that world in earnest three years ago, he was struck by their roots in brotherhood and escapism.
“I researched one club in particular, and it began in the ’40s, after World War II, and it was really just a group of guys getting together to blow off steam,” said Sutter in a recent phone interview. “They loved to go fast and they formed this bond, this brotherhood. And within a very short period of time — within 10, 11 years — it went from this fraternity of veterans to essentially an outlaw, organized crime syndicate. I was just fascinated by that arc.
“My thought was, how did that first guy who said, ‘Hey, let’s get together, ride bikes and have some beers’ — how did that first guy ultimately feel about where the club went?”
Thus, for two seasons, the ghost of John Teller, a Vietnam veteran and one of the founders of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, has hovered over the drama. Before John’s death more than a decade ago, the Sons had become gun dealers and the de facto rulers of the Northern California town of Charming. In the first season of the show, John’s son, Jax (Charlie Hunnam), the vice president of the Sons, was deeply affected by reading John’s unpublished memoir, which describes the original, utopian aims of the club and his disillusionment with what it became.
“The mythology is that Jax had a younger brother, Thomas,” Katey Sagal, who plays Jax’s mother, Gemma, said in an interview earlier in the show’s second season. “And when Thomas died, John Teller sort of changed and was not as motivated to keep the business running. There’s a lot of questioning that she sees in her own son. (Jax) is more the philosopher.”
His attempts to lead the club back toward John’s ideals — not to mention Jax’s headstrong nature — have put him in conflict with Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), the club’s tough president and the man who married John’s formidable widow, Gemma. But the revelation that Gemma had been raped by a group of white supremacists — an attack that Gemma kept secret for a time, at great psychological cost — reunified the fractured club.
As the end of the season approaches, in addition to seeking vengeance for Gemma, the Sons also have to fend off a government investigation, the machinations of rival gangs and problems with their Irish gun suppliers.
Even as Sutter piled problems on SAMCRO (Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Original), the show became a breakout hit for FX. “Sons” regularly draws 3.5 million live viewers — an outstanding figure for a cable show, and a steep increase from the show’s first season — and “Sons” has, on occasion, beat “The Jay Leno Show” in the key 18-49 ratings demographic. So it’s no surprise that Sutter said “Sons’” third-season renewal should be announced by FX very soon.
FX has made a name for itself by building shows around iconoclastic characters, and Sutter’s previous job as a writer for “The Shield” gave him plenty of experience at depicting the world of a complicated antihero. But Jax is a very different man than “The Shield’s” Vic Mackey, who spent years trying to either cover up or mitigate his terrible choices. Jax’s loyalty to the club is paramount, but his idealistic desire to take the Sons in a different direction and right mistakes that were made before he was born puts him at odds with a culture his father helped create.
“The one challenge that FX had with the show (when it was being developed) is that they’d never had a lead character this young,” Sutter said. “They were trying to cast it older initially, and I fought against it. My point was that Jax is a man, but he hasn’t decided what kind of man he is going to be. That’s what the series is about.
“Not to compare (‘Sons’) to ‘The Sopranos,’ but what rooted Tony (Soprano) was always the vulnerability,” Sutter added. “At the root of it, Tony was just a guy who had immense self-loathing, which always brought him to his knees and always had him questioning. Ultimately I think people tap into (Jax) because of his vulnerability and his questions. … Jax makes mistakes.”
“I think that these are people that cling to that unit because they’re kind of displaced in the rest of the world,” Sagal said.
But the exacting code of the motorcycle club doesn’t make it any easier to figure out how to be a good father, mother or son. The struggle between loyalty and independence, between the legacy of the past and aspirations for the future — those are situations any viewer can identify with. And via his Twitter account and his take-no-prisoners blog, Sutter has heard from people from all walks of life, male and female, who have become fans of the complex, challenging world of the Sons.
“Even though it’s a quest of a son seeking out a father … it’s about the relationship between a mother and a son and that will continue to be the primary relationship in this series,” said Sutter, who is married to Sagal.
“Coming into it, it wasn’t like, ‘Let me create these really strong women characters so I can tap into female viewers,’ but ultimately I think (the show) started speaking to that. I think it’s why not just women, but people outside that world may be shocked that they’re attracted to a show that has this tone or this subject matter. I think it’s because of those primary relationships: mother, son; brother, brother; father, son.”
Sutter, a native of New Jersey, didn’t actually set out to be a writer; he spent his 20s as an actor in New York.
When he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers University, he volunteered to usher for a 1984 New York production of “Balm in Gilead,” which starred Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble members Laurie Metcalf and Gary Sinise and was directed by John Malkovich. Sutter saw that production at least 15 times (and alert SAMCRO devotees will note tributes to the Lanford Wilson play in the titles of recent “Sons” episodes).
“It was probably the most amazing theater production I’d ever seen. It blew my mind that you could do that with theater,” Sutter said. “I just remember Malkovich sitting on the steps of the theater every night taking notes.”
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