I vowed to stop watching “Sons of Anarchy” about the time one of the gang’s daughters was burned alive by another ruthless gang leader. It was a scene that could have been done any number of ways — off screen, subtly, or just through the ashes of what had happened.
But no, this grown woman burned and screamed and burned and burned. You could almost smell burning flesh. And you definitely got the notion that those making the series were having a good time doing it.
That notion was confirmed this summer when the show’s director and executive producer, Paris Barclay, who is also the recently elected President of the Directors Guild of America, talked at the TV Critics Association summer press tour about how much fun it is to be a TV director these days. “Even when we burn young ladies, there’s a bit of amusement to be had,” Barclay said.
Well, to hell with them.
“Sons of Anarchy” began with some grit and ambition, and got all of its Shakespearean comparisons from its copping of the “Hamlet” story, with the prince’s father having been killed by the current king, his uncle, who married his mom. All on motorcycles!
Now, the series has dragged on five seasons and any of those hifalutin allusions are faded into creator Kurt Sutter’s sadistic touches which are, when they are not straight out misogyny are racist to boot. Nobody is quicker to stage a race war than Sutter.
A quick catch-up that begins tonight’s episode shows some of the spectacular deaths of last season: Someone shot in the head, another guy who bit his tongue off, anything to gross out TV. Sutter puts on shows the way Ryan Murphy does with “American Horror Story” for the same network: with a certain contempt for the audience that says you want to mess with their heads.
How does this season start off? Well, a couple of main characters are in jail, there’s a racial war against Iranian pornographers, and a beat up woman. It’s all topped though by that ugliest of modern horror: The school shooting.
That the gun a kid uses to kill his classmates was the one of the guns from the gang puts the motorcycle club in a bad position. Aw, poor gun-running motorcycle club. Put them all in jail. And what does the gang do to the upset mother of the killer kid? You’ll have to watch next week to catch that outrage.
Sutter for his part said at press tour he planned that story line for a few years. “I knew, obviously, that it would be somewhat controversial, but I feel like, you know, as much as I wouldn’t do something because it was controversial, I’m also not going to do something because it’s controversial.”
Sutter said he felt it was organic to the story “in terms of it’s what these guys do. I feel like thematically it’s the right fit because we have a lead character who’s a father who’s trying to figure out if he can raise his sons and avoid the kind of violence that happens.
“There’s a lot of blood and guts in my show,” he said. “And it is a signature of the show. But it’s also I feel like and I feel like I’m not lying to myself when I say this is that nothing is done gratuitously, that the events that happen in the premiere are really the catalyst for the third act of this morality play we’re doing.”
Or as Barclay said, “even when we burn young ladies, there’s a bit of amusement to be had.”