As I noted yesterday, Sons of Anarchy returned last night for its third season, and by the end of the episode, I was already desperate for next week’s installment. The first episode of season two ended with Gemma’s rape, an act which spurred much of the action in the rest of the season and immediately jolted the viewer into emotional investment. Kurt Sutter clearly has a taste for kicking things off with a bang, because the end of “So” performed a similarly impressive feat of emotional heightening. After the long, slow burn of Jax’s nearly affect-less despair throughout the episode, the sight of him turning berserk in front of the entire SoA and the Charming police force was enough to make you gasp. It would have been a sufficient gesture for the episode’s end, but then capping everything off with the image of Hale’s brains spattered across the road – and it’s obvious that the props and makeup people did everything in their power to telegraph that Hale is absolutely, thoroughly dead – felt like the final knife twist I didn’t realize I was anticipating.

It was a strong episode all around, but particular praise has to go to Charlie Hunnam and Maggie Siff, who both completely sold their grief and fury at Abel’s kidnapping. Jax makes the journey from comatose on his son’s nursery floor all the way to enraged Angel of Vengeance in just under an hour, and it was mesmerizing. The episode built several emotional marker points along the way – Jax gripping his son’s blue SoA hat, the moment when Jax’s grief actually diffuses a nascent gang war, his alienation from and then return to Tara – and they were all accompanied by some really lovely cinematography that movingly conveyed his increasing isolation from the club. There were so many great shots of Jax alone, but the classic for this episode has to be Jax slumped in front of his father’s tombstone, with the first of his “SO” “NS” pair of rings perched in focus behind him. It’s an elegant little bit of familial patterning. A dead father who fell apart when he lost his son, the remaining son now on the verge of collapse after his own son is kidnapped, all three of them damaged by their association with the Sons; a pair of rings that together spell SONS, but the first one by itself only spells the empty, rudderless word “So,” which is also, of course, the episode’s title.

My only complaint about the setup for season three is that much as I love Gemma and Hal Holbrook playing out Gemma’s own familial drama (and of course, it makes so much sense that Gemma’s father would be a minister), I worry that she’ll be absent from the club for too long. All of these sons and fathers are much better, more balanced, more interesting people in the presence of their mothers and daughters, and Gemma’s too crucial to the show’s balance to be missing the action. On the other hand, Gemma’s grandson has been kidnapped and no one told her? I am almost looking forward to the rage that will no doubt rain down from the heavens. Please let it be sooner rather than later.

Hooray, Fall TV is coming back! Other than the stellar Mad Men season currently underway and a few pleasant highlights (like Huge), I am more than ready to hand over a summer of kicky, fluffy, brightly lit USA procedurals and derivative reality shows for a solid TV schedule. Here are some of the releases circled on my September calendar:

Sons of Anarchy – I’ve been waiting to write this post for a while, and could conceivably have put it up several weeks ago as release dates became available, but I decided it would just be too painful to anticipate all of these shows and then have to wait forever. But I’ve waited long enough, because FX’s amazing Sons of Anarchy returns tonight! There’s an interesting NYTimes piece which suggests that Sons of Anarchy is the show that best tackles the current American tendency toward fringe politics, and while that isn’t the show’s primary source of interest for me, it is a prominent feature. Neo-nazis and anarchists aside, Sons of Anarchy is a fabulous Shakespearean drama disguised as a biker fantasy and peopled with murderers, gun runners, the ghost of King Hamlet in biker manifesto form, and some fantastically powerful women. Long live SAMCRO.

Boardwalk Empire – Easily the most anticipated release this fall, Boardwalk Empire is HBO’s next major must-watch production. The setting is Prohibition Era Atlantic City, and the show centers on the early gangsters and politicians who made the city into a capital of crime and hedonism. It features Steve Buscemi as the main character Nucky Thompson, it also stars Michael K. Williams of The Wire fame, and Martin Scorsese directed the pilot. It also premieres on September 19^th, which means Sunday nights are soon going to be very, very busy for me.

Chuck – Okay, we all know I have a strange and powerful weakness love for Chuck, and am thrilled it’s getting an early fall premiere date rather than being pushed to mid-season. As with any season of Chuck, this one may well be the show’s last, so treasure it for all it’s worth.

Undercovers – At the Visionaries panel at Comic-Con this year, JJ Abrams worked to characterize what he hopes will be a healthy balance between episodic and serialized plotlines for his new spy show, which premieres September 22^nd. I don’t know. On one side, I see a show like Fringe, which became quite interesting and worthwhile at the end of last season, and which has almost certainly managed to survive because of its commitment to episodic storytelling. On the other side, it’s clear to me that Fringe only became compelling once it managed to walk away from the straight up Monster of the Week format and throw itself full force into Crazy Doppelganger Land. I’m sympathetic to the desire for seriality and the need for something like an episodic show’s accessibility, but I almost always feel that shows trying to be both things end up doing neither of them well.

Law and Order: LA – Law and Order is dead, and yet, like a zombie apocalypse’s Patient Zero, its progeny live on, beginning September 29^th.

The Walking Dead – This one’s cheating, because it doesn’t come out until the end of October. For now, watch the trailer and marvel at how awesome it will be.

I’m beyond thrilled by how good Sons of Anarchy has been for the last several weeks, and although it’s been almost a week since the last episode aired and there’ll be a new one tomorrow night, I wanted to take a moment and mention why the show’s been working so well lately. (I’m also posting about Sons of Anarchy on a Monday because it’s pretty much the best thing on television at the moment, and I am still in deep post-Mad Men coping mode.)

SAMCRO

As I began to describe in my previous post about this show, Sons of Anarchy deals with a world I find completely foreign, which is both a good and bad thing for new viewers. On the one hand, you’re going to immediately alienate people who feel absolutely no interest in a crazy gun-dealing biker gang, and who will overlook an otherwise intelligent, well-made drama because it’s about dudes with skulls and crossbones on their leather vests. If you can overcome that barrier, though, the premise’s unfamiliarity becomes an asset. I am fascinated by the rules and rituals of the club, and everything from the vocabulary to the honor code becomes a way of establishing a fully realized, richly detailed environment. For instance, the leather vest I just mentioned is actually a “cut.” The club is an “MC,” and you always collect all the cell phones before “going to church,” (attending a formal club meeting).

What I hadn’t previously considered about the benefits of this particular world is that the nature of an MC allows the show to balance some intriguing emotional extremes. Like Deadwood or The Shield, violence is mandatory. The codes of an MC require retaliation, and SAMCRO’s mission to protect Charming, CA from drugs and crime does not mean ending drugs and guns everywhere, it just means shifting the crime and drug trafficking somewhere else. This is what I expect from a show about bikers – there will be anger and gunfire, and probably a lot of sex. The more I learn about the foundation of this show and what the MC is really about, however, the more I understand that this show is also about sentiment. When the club talks about brotherhood, loyalty, and love, they mean it with the same sincerity as a national anthem or a Hallmark card. Unlike The Sopranos, where families look like cohesive units but perpetually tear each other apart, most members of SAMCRO have every reason to abandon or destroy the club, and instead, time and again they choose to stay and fight for the club’s survival. At its best moment, Jax and Opie realize that SAMCRO president Clay Morrow has become a liability to the club, but instead of deciding to stage a coup, Jax acknowledges, “The burden lands on the club. Clay is Clay because of us. We made him.” Instead of violence, they decide to change the club from within.

For a bunch of badass bikers, they sure do spend a lot of time hugging each other and crying.

The resulting show is a potent and satisfying mixture of violence and unabashed familial love, and the most recent episodes have pushed that all-too-dangerous combination to its extreme. There’s a lot of black humor here, as well as cynicism and depression, but to my surprise, it turns out the bikers are at heart one of the sappiest groups of guys you will ever meet. Near the end of last week’s episode, “Service,” Clay struggles to comfort his traumatized wife, and his second-in-command finally reminds Clay that the best thing he can do is remind Gemma that he still loves her. Then Clay and Tig give each other big bear hugs, and Tig says, “I love you, brother,” and it would be the most cloying, obnoxious moment ever if it weren’t so tender. And obviously true.

This week and next will be the final two episodes of this season, and as much as I’m looking forward to them, I’m dreading the absence of this show. The good news is that ABC and NBC have both announced the upcoming premiere dates for their popular mid-season releases. LOST will be returning February 2^nd at 9pm, and Chuck is coming back January 10^th, with regular airdates on Mondays at 8. I’m looking forward to fully analyzing my love-hate relationship with LOST in weekly “The chemists say, I say” blog posts, and I would love nothing more than for Chuck to be so awesome as to also justify a weekly post. We’re heading into the winter television slump, but I’m trying to keep my eye on the highlights.

It took me a long while to catch on, but I’ve been watching a lot of Sons of Anarchy lately, and wow, that show is good. Like Friday Night Lights, it’s not a premise I initially found worthwhile – Sons of Anarchy is about a motorcycle gang in Northern California who run guns across state lines and get into all sorts of mischief with other gangs. I have absolutely no patience with violence for violence’s sake, and in the beginning of the series, I found it nearly impossible to connect with and root for the main character, Jax Teller. He has stringy hair and a Spencer Pratt-esque flesh colored beard, and in the first several episodes shows nowhere near the appropriate amount of emotion given the events that quickly overtake him. It’s a show about men, I thought, being gross drunken violent men who shoot each other. It’s called Sons of Anarchy – what was I expecting?

Jax Teller, Bobby "Elvis," and Sam Crow President Clay Morrow

As the show hits its stride midway through the first season, and then catapults into a truly impressive second season run, Sons of Anarchy began feel more and more mythic, and that’s when the bell started to ring for me. The themes, especially as they relate to the men, are downright Shakespearean – fathers and sons, the conflict between honor and moral action, the possibility of justified violence, masculinity and brotherhood, loyalty and wisdom. At times, Sons of Anarchy seems to be an adaptation of the Henry Bolingbroke history plays, with Jax as a young Prince Hal and the motorcycle club as a band of brothers straight out of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. (Bobby, who works as an Elvis impersonator on the weekends and whose large stature belies his ability to ride a motorcycle, would be my candidate for Falstaff). There’s also a hefty dose of Hamlet worked into the plot – Jax’s mother remarries his father’s best friend, the club’s current president. Even more than the plot, though, Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original, or Sam Crow, has a code of conduct and an idealized mission that feel out of place in a world of post-modern irony.

Katey Sagal as Gemma Teller

If the men of Sam Crow resemble a Shakespearean cast of characters, so too do the women, although it took much longer for the show to fully embody them. Unrepresented by the show’s title and barred from Sam Crow membership, the wives, girlfriends, prostitutes and daughters that populate the background of Charming, California seem at first like incidental, throwaway cardboard cutouts. Once the show really begins to click, it becomes immediately clear that the women are without question at the core of Sons of Anarchy. Jax’s high school sweetheart Tara, now a doctor at the local hospital, drives Jax to reconsider his life and the club’s criminal enterprises. After he returns from several years in prison, Opie’s wife Donna wants him to quit the club and earn money legally, driving a wedge between Opie and Jax. The ATF agent tracking the Sons of Anarchy wears her hair down and terrorizes the local sheriff’s department. And Gemma, queen of Sam Crow, president Clay Morrow’s wife and Jax’s mother, is always at the center of everything, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, and Portia rolled into one. Jax’s ex-wife calls Gemma “Dr. Jekyll and Donna Reed.” She bakes, she decorates, she does the laundry, she shakes down porn stars for cash and tells her husband he’ll need to kill a traitor. Gemma is a force of nature, and the second season wisely gives her a potent, ticking time-bomb plotline.

As soon as women began to take on more significant roles, the whole show shifted. What in the beginning was a plot about a group of guys roaming the highways and trading gunfire with rival gangs quickly transformed into an exploration of motorcycle club culture, complete with oddly conservative family structures and anachronistic gender roles. Sons of Anarchy became fiction about the inevitability of progress rather than the inevitability of violence. Sons of Anarchy became awesome.