Sons of Anarchy

[peanutbutter]

At the time I thought this was absolute dogshit but in a sort of dumb and bizarre way that was often quite entertaining. 7 years removed I'm left wondering was it actually kind of alright? Feels like the overall quality of the top tier of TV during its runtime (2008-2014) was drastically ahead of where we're at today and maybe its cheap thrills fare better when not being directly compared to other shows of the period or things that had recently finished (most obviously the Shield, which SoA has a lot in common with and compares quite badly to in general)

Right now I'd fucking love a weekly show to look forward to each week and there's been very little since Better Call Saul. On the horizon there's just the final season of it and Succession. The recent frenzy around Line of Duty seems more to be due to an absense of any alternatives than anything inherently good about that show. SoA 100% would have sufficed if it was airing right now for me.


Anyways yes, has anyone watched it since it ended?

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I never even got around to seeing it end the first time. I thought the first series was really good - pure trash, but entertaining, compelling trash - but it tailed off after that. I think it was somewhere in the fourth series that I realised that I just wasn't bothered about it any more. And that was before they started doing 90-minute long episodes.

[paruses]

Gave up during the series where theu went to Ireland as it was really boring. Also the whole series can go in the Worst Location Doubling thread.

Really enjoyed it up to that point though. There's probably another 10 series after that one.

[peanutbutter]

I never even got around to seeing it end the first time. I thought the first series was really good - pure trash, but entertaining, compelling trash - but it tailed off after that. I think it was somewhere in the fourth series that I realised that I just wasn't bothered about it any more. And that was before they started doing 90-minute long episodes.

My memory of it was that season 1 was entertaining trash and 2 almost showed signs of being good. After that it had some shockingly stinky moments but I kept watching and there was a surrealness to how stupid it all was that definitely helped.

Final season had 90 minute episodes, but Sutter had absolutely no use for them so basically every episode had two extended music montages. It's like he demanded it as an absurd thing in the hope of getting some other concessions and had to run with it after FX accepted.



One thing I will say in its favour is that for a show where the characters are pretty much all the one kind of cunt, I seem to remember the whole ensemble very well.

[Satchmo Distel]

Awful acting and gratuitous violence. The premise could have worked for a series or two with better performances. It falls apart completely after the lead

Spoiler alert

kills the boss and takes over

[close]

. If ever an actor was miscast, that was him.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

The first season showed some promise, which came to fruition during season 2, with the white supremacists (played by Adam Arkin, who's Jewish, and Henry Rollins, who's also definitely not a supremacist). Season 3, the one in Northern Ireland, was quite a letdown apart from the finale. I then enjoyed most of the fourth season, the one with Ray McKinnon, once again apart from the finale, which was an achievement in contrived stupidity. Seasons 5 to 7 were crap, apart from some fine performances by Jimmy Smits and Walton Goggins, culminating in the insanity of the series finale.

The way the show degenerated into complete stupidity (at one point, the guys from SAMCRO execute some baddie by forming a circle two meters around him and emptying their guns at him) is a mixture of Kurt Sutter and FX's worst instincts.

Sutter, when he was a writer on The Shield, already had a reputation for being unhinged. His presence was helpful as he came up with some outlandish plots, which, when toned down by the other writers, could make some perfectly fine pulpy material. In its early seasons, SoA had good ratings, which would have allowed it to wrap properly its Hamlet-on-wheels story in five seasons. The network often asked for guest stars, for publicity reasons, resulting in some stunt casting (Stephen King, David Hasselhoff, etc.)

But around seasons 4 and 5, there was a major uptick in ratings. At some point, it was the most watched program in the entire history of FX. So, there was no way they'd wrap the show early, which also meant spinning out the main "Hamlet" plot for as long as possible.

Research also showed something very surprising, which was that the show was highly popular with the middle-aged women crowd, as they enjoyed watching Charlie Hunnam doing some bad boy stuff. And his butt in sex scenes. Remember that he was briefly signed as the lead for Fifty Shades of Grey. Same audience.
Then, Kurt Sutter had some free reign to develop frankly idiotic and sometimes nauseating ideas, like the school shooting that opened season six (which opens a contrived investigation by the DA), or the cuckolding stuff when Clay is in jail.

Anyway, by the final season, the show was such a juggernaut that the network begged Sutter to deliver extended cuts of the episodes, so they could sell one or two more batches of commercials at their highest rates (and they begged for some spin-off, which came in the form of Mayans MC). Sutter obliged, but there was one caveat, which was that he also had to deliver a standard length version of the episodes for syndication and export. So, they filled the extra minutes with pointless scenes and montages, usually backed by Katey Sagal singing a slowed-down acoustic version of some rock or soul standard. As long as Hunnam would show his tattooed back and his sweet ass, all was well for FX.

The Clay Morrow stuff was twice a big issue in the creative decline of the show.

Spoiler alert

First, they had to keep him alive at the end of season 4 while every beat of the story cried for Jax to kill him. So, they had to introduce CIA agents in a cover operation in the US (which is impossible) to justify keeping him on the show for at least one more season. And when he finally died, the most charismatic character on the show was gone, which made the remaining, where the other Sons were continually saying how great of a leader Jax was, completely ridiculous. Well, until it reached Christic proportions. And Jax didn't even have time, trust him, to fix this and go legit.

[close]

[peanutbutter]

Whoa, that explains an awful lot!
Still, wish I had something like it to watch these days...



I think Hunnam was pretty well cast tbh, everyone in the show seems to assign a ludicrous amount of respect towards him off the back of fuck all. It's dumb and objectively doesn't make sense but it helps cover for the kind of ludicrous respect everyone seems to give him? Just a weird aura and they're all deciding that must mean he's amazing. I imagine the fact he's such an odd fit was part of why he was cast?

[BeardFaceMan]

The show ended so badly I didn't even bother with the Mayans MC spin-off, is it any good?

[Mr Farenheit]

From what I remember of the first four or five episodes I watched Mayans MC continued the worst aspects of SoA but without any memorable characters.

I watched the whole of SoA and enjoyed how ridiculous it all was ('Fire or Knife?') but the last season(s) was boring. I skipped through almost all of the hosiptal scenes. I liked how pathetic and wimpy the sheffif was in the first seasons, but didn't like the fake hands guy later on as the butt of the jokes. Obviously lost a lot when Big Papa was killed off. The theme tune was terrible, really hated the 'crow flies straaaaaaight' line.

They had a great table though- one of the best in TV, with only Stannis' table in Game of Thrones beating it for my money. These are my top two TV tables- struggling to think of any others.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

I think Hunnam was pretty well cast tbh, everyone in the show seems to assign a ludicrous amount of respect towards him off the back of fuck all.

It was even worse on the next Kurt Sutter show, The Bastard Executioner, which took place in Wales, as the episodes would remind you every five minutes.
The lead, who was terribly cast (Stephen Moyer and the female lead were a thousand times more entertaining than him), gathers at some point a gang of misfits, similar to the Sons. They all had their family slaughtered with extreme cruelty in their backstories, sometimes in front of their very eyes the day before, but for some reason they decide that the guy had it worse than them, and then they follow him blindly because he's a great guy.

With all the comments about the latest Star Wars or Star Trek projects having a "Mary Sue", Sutter is a thousand times worse. Sure he usually casts himself as some highly mutilated revulsive character, but the lead character of his shows is always the idea of a grown-up alpha male fictional double some bullied teenager would come up with. And then I read that he was morbidly obese (he weighed 400 pounds at some point) and had a few surgeries to remove some extra skin after he had lost weight. That explains a lot.