FX

I’ll spare you a detailed recap because if you didn’t see the episode, you shouldn’t be reading this article in the first place — and besides, appreciation and speculation is more fun. As written by Tim Minear and directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, it was perhaps the show’s spookiest episode to date, campy and trippy (check out all those dissolves!) yet straightforwardly horrific, in the art house/grindhouse vein of a 1970s Ken Russell or Dario Argento picture.

First, the appreciations: Chad’s insouciant “You gotta love this house!” was a trailer-made laugh line because it said what many of us were thinking. I do indeed love The Murder House, which as far as I’m concerned has already earned a spot on the list of great cinematic nightmare real estate, along with the Bates Motel in “Psycho,” the Dakota in “Rosemary’s Baby,” the academy in “Suspiria,” the starship Nostromo in “Alien” and the hospital in Lars von Trier’s original Danish miniseries “The Kingdom” (which “AHS” is resembling more and more with each passing week). It’s a dream space, even more so than the rest of the locations on this batshit-crazy series. Once you settle into the show’s super-bitchy Grand Guignol groove, you get used to the fact that pretty much anything can happen, and start to look forward to the latest outrage in much the same way that you might have looked forward to the less ghastly twists that used to fill out old-fashioned weekday soap operas, the kind that the broadcast networks don’t make anymore. (CBS called “Dallas” a nighttime soap back in the day, but it was a “Little House on the Prairie” romp through sun-dappled meadows compared to this.)

What else was there to like? Oh, come on, what wasn’t awesome? I loved the torchlit flashback to the Roanoake colony, where supposedly 117 dead souls tormented the living until they were dispersed by a magic word, and I loved how Violet tried it on Chad and it didn’t work. (I was reminded of Barlow the vampire’s great line in Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”: “Give me a bite … I love garlic.”) We got some explanations (via the medium) as to what in the Sam Hill is going on up in that house; apparently it’s a conduit to the dark beyond, and it’s spreading evil and misery out into our world via tormented ghosts that serve as its permanent residents and ambassadors. Or something. Like it matters! The escalating shocks and turn-on-a-dime segues from melodrama to catfight humor are the real draw here — that and the cast, which would probably be more widely appreciated for its dazzling tonal control if the show weren’t part of an inherently déclassé genre. The thickening mythology is intriguing, too — and grimly funny. There’s a pyramid scheme aspect to the way that the ghosts keep murdering the living, driving them to suicide or killing them off as collateral damage in other outrages. They’re forcibly recruiting for the house, swelling the ranks of the tortured dead. The way Violet described it in her tearful confrontation with Tate, the young man essentially killed her mom by raping her and impregnating her with a demon-spawn. (If I were Violet, I’d break up with him, too.) All that on top of Tate’s other, past murders. I gotta hand it to the kid, he’s a hard worker; if this were “Glengarry Glen Ross,” he’d take the Cadillac away from Ricky Roma.

As Constance, Jessica Lange should win not just a best supporting actress Emmy, but a special bonus award for keeping a straight face when Chad answered her terse, “Man should not lie with man, it’s an abomination!” with “So’s that hairdo.” That was a good one, but I liked the dialogue in the climactic scene with Constance, Moira and Hayden even better. Moira: “She’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen.” Constance: “From blood and pain come perfection.” Moira (appearing at the back of the kitchen): “Hey, bitches … You wipe that slime off my baby yet?” Now that Vivien has given birth in the most psychedelically nightmarish delivery sequence since “Rosemary’s Baby” — the dolly-backward away from her blood-drenched corpse had an Argento-like mournfulness — where can the show possibly go from here? The previews for next week’s episode set up a multi-tentacled undead custody battle over the two babies, and showed Ben threatening Constance and putting a gun to his own head. My money’s on Ben becoming the final regular cast member to join the ranks of the spirit world, thus paving the way for new arrivals in the Murder House next season. With the body count somewhere in the double digits, the latest buyers should be able to pick the place up for a song.

I’m a bit perturbed that executive producer Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s FX series apparently claimed most of their enthusiasm this year, leaving their exuberantly silly and occasionally brilliant Fox network series “Glee” to founder this season and eventually succumb to the stupidity and half-assedness that were always nipping at its heels even during strong weeks. But this outcome was creatively and perhaps biologically inevitable. As the doctor explained, all the necessary nutrients were devoured by the larger fetus.

Written by “X-Files” veteran James Wong and directed by Michael Lehmann (“Heathers”), the hour greatly escalated the madness on this already demented show. Created by “Glee” executive producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the series seems to be inventing a new kind of horror — a 21st-century, short-attention-span-theater version, with no lulls. The traditional buildup to the big scare? Booooo-ring. Perhaps operating under the assumption — not unwarranted — that most viewers are watching the program on DVR or illegal download and will just fast-forward to the “good parts” anyhow, they’ve decided to save us all the bother. Every few seconds there’s a fabulously bitchy one-liner, a grim bit of exposition or a surprisingly deft transition between the two, or a beating or stabbing or disembowelment or horrendous searing of flesh, or a faintly S&M-dungeon-flavored sex scene, or a revelation that a character you thought was alive was actually dead all along, or that the heroine has been impregnated by both her husband and by a black-rubber-suited spectral hunk and is carrying both of their children.

What happened tonight? Let’s review — with the caveat that when you describe the actual events on this show, they sound like the plot of a hypothetical horror novel being plotted out by a couple of precocious 13-year-olds.

Ben Harmon visited his wife Vivien at the asylum where he’d had her committed and shamefacedly said that he should have believed her when she said she was raped, because of the aforementioned dual pregnancy and the fact that the only other man Ben suspected Vivien of having sex with — the handsome black home security guy played by Morris Chestnutt — is sterile. The non-Ben twin is courtesy of Tate Langdon, the dead school shooter who’s in love with the Harmons’ troubled daughter Violet. A team of detectives headed by Charles S. Dutton (who always seems to be investigating something) called on Lange’s character (and Tate’s mother) Constance, whose boy-toy lover, Travis, was recently found vivisected in a weed-strewn lot in the manner of the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Viewers who saw last week’s episode knew that the latter atrocity was no mere copycat crime. In the show’s mythology, the Dahlia –  played by “American Beauty” co-star Mena Suvari — was an aspiring actress who died of an excess of anesthesia while being sleep-raped by her dentist (Joshua Malina, no doubt missing Aaron Sorkin terribly); the vivisection was committed by the ghost of a murdered surgeon who was living in the dentist’s house at the time. The surgeon vivisected Travis in the Dahlia style to help out Hayden, the vengeful former lover of Ben Harmon, who killed Travis after having ghost-sex with him and learning that he was going to marry Constance anyway. Larry Harvey, Constance’s long-ago gentleman friend and Ben’s disfigured stalker, killed Hayden very early in the season, and Ben buried her body in the yard and built a gazebo on top of it. Pretty much everyone who ever lived in, or even visited this house is a murderer or murder victim. Sex! Rape! Murder! Ghost rape! Ghost sex! Ghost murder! That’s what the writing staff chants before every meeting, I bet. I also think the black rubber suit belongs to Ryan Murphy and that he wears it while watching rough cuts.

Anyway, the two Big Reveals in the episode were (1) Violet is actually dead and has been for quite some time, having bought it during an earlier suicide attempt, and (2) Larry falsely confessed to killing Travis out of unrequited love for Constance.  How unrequited? Permanently, I’d say. That last scene between the two of them was truly pathetic — the hapless romantic literally reaching out to the object of his desire, placing his hand on the glass hoping for some kind of reciprocal gesture, and Constance reaching her hand out, then drawing it back and walking away. The tearful scene in which Tate tried to convince Violet to join him in death — even though she’s already there! Psych! — was simultaneously dumb and powerful in the way that dreams often are.  Violet’s assent turned out to be a ruse that allowed her to escape the attic and discover that her father had been beaten unconscious by Tate, but in the moment it made a certain thoroughly irrational, adolescent sense. Or a dream sense.

The whole series captures this emotionally upside-down feeling, even in scenes so weakly conceived that they might have been extracted from the writers’ posteriors with huge tongs. “American Horror Story” has that eerie twilight quality that afflicts the consciousness when you’re half asleep or awake. You aren’t quite sure if the dream you’re having is really happening; you may wonder if the logical inconsistencies aren’t just evidence that you don’t, in fact, know everything, that there are some important workaday rules that nobody explained to you, like “Some of the people in your life that you think are alive have actually been dead for years,” or, “If a woman has sex with a male ghost, she can get pregnant, and give birth to the world-ending abomination that supposedly every ascendant Pope is warned about.” This is the kind of series in which the murdered Travis’ ghost can ask Larry if his death made the news, then seem half-delighted that Constance took his death “pretty hard,” then slightly hurt that she hasn’t been over to see him yet, then introduce Larry to the disfigured ghosts of his wife and two daughters, who died when Larry’s wife learned of their affair back in 1994 and set them all ablaze. The button on the end of this dazzling scene — which shifts from smart-ass humor to soapy sentiment to heartsick grief and guilt — was the conversation between Larry and his wife. It suggested that there’s an underlying moral and parapsychological order to the show’s madness, and that it will eventually be revealed to us.  “Why am I seeing you [all] now, after all this time?” “You’re ready now … You’re on the cusp.” But on the cusp of what?

Oh, let’s not kid ourselves. Murphy and Falchuk cannot possibly have a long-range vision for any of this. Nothing that either of them has ever worked on indicates a talent for — hell, even an inclination toward — left-brained qualities such as story structure and character consistency. “Nip/Tuck” and “Popular” both had a “We’re just making this up as we go” quality, and despite moments of utter brilliance, “Glee” always was, and remains, a weekly 12-car pileup on the Bad Idea Freeway. These guys have very, very, very short attention spans. You can tell by the sorts of shows they make, and in the case of “Glee,” largely abandon when a newer, shinier project becomes available. (Did you watch “Glee” last night? Maybe the most half-assed and disorganized episode yet, and that’s saying something; in every closeup of Idina Menzel, you could see the fear and panic in her eyes, as if she were trying to send a psychic distress signal through the TV screen begging somebody, anybody, to give her some direction.)

That’s why I haven’t bothered hypothesizing about the “rules” of “American Horror Story”: Why a ghost can seem “alive” to actual living people, why the maid Moira appears as old to certain characters but young to others. I just don’t think it matters that much, or that Murphy and Falchuk gave it much thought before FX said yes to their pitch for a horror series. Yes, yes, on a basic level, I get it; it’s ultimately not too different from any other ghost story, a form that presents dead people as manifestations of living people’s longings, sins and unfinished business. It’s all about what’s in the eye, or the heart, of the beholder — thus Ben realizing that Vivien told him the truth when she said she was raped, and suddenly seeing Moira as an older woman instead of a younger one. (Ben saw the young Moira instead of the old Moira for the same reason that the Armenian home buyer did — because he’s a horndog.)

But really, the parsing of rules regarding ghost sex and ghost rape and ghost pregnancy and appearances and projections and guilt and the desire for redemption (Larry’s motivation for his false confession) is ultimately a parlor game. It doesn’t explain precisely what sort of universe we’re seeing, and why characters who have no prior contact with the house or its inhabitants can instantly “see” dead people and mistake them for living, and why certain characters appear in the condition they were in when they died, while others look just peachy — and why so many doomed people keep being drawn to the same freaking house. Maybe every character on this show is already dead, or in purgatory. Maybe the series is set in Hell, or on the edge of Hell, or it’s all just a disturbed child’s daydream. Whatever. I suspect the explanations behind “American Horror Story” will matter even less than the “mythology” of another addictive and pretty clearly ret-conned fantasy drama, “Lost.” I’m not watching “American Horror Story” to Figure It All Out. I’m watching it to appreciate the eerie confidence of Jessica Lange, with her Tennessee Williams accent and dancer’s hands and Gorgon stare, and Denis O’Hare’s deft comedy/tragedy footwork as Larry, and to see just how long Murphy, Falchuk and the gang can continue to sustain this nerve-jangling feat of bravura show-running. One more season? One more week? One more minute? Sooner or later this show will fall apart, or implode like the house in “Poltergiest,” and I want to be there when it happens.

On the plus side, you can’t say that Sutter didn’t pave the way for this. Romero “Romeo” Parada seemed awfully black ops for a biker, a soldier in more than the metaphoric sense — and a reader points out that they were in the Mexican Army before joining the cartel. He and his colleagues often seemed to possess knowledge, even foreknowledge, of key events that felt a tad Tom Clancy-ish. But on the minus side, well, this was just wild. They might as well have gone all the way and had Danny Trejo peel back the skin of his forearm to expose circuitry and tell Linc, in an Austrian accent, “Now listen to me very carefully …”

It was ultimately no sillier, though, than anything else on “Sons of Anarchy,” a testosterone-addled soap-opera fairy tale that also happens to be one of TV’s most consistently well-constructed, confident, entertaining shows. Juice getting handed the jacket with the racially incriminating info and being told he could tear it up himself; Linc righting the cosmic scales after the bust’s collapse by dumping that box-load of sex toys at the city council meeting to keep the mayor and chief developer from suburbanizing Charming; almost all the stuff related to the Irish Kings, the Sons and the Cartel: The show was a deus ex machina jamboree.

The twists all worked, I think, because their goal wasn’t to neutralize existing season-four plot developments, but kick things up a notch and pave the way for Season 5, which looks as though it’s going to find all these characters bound together even more tightly than they were before: cops and criminals, bikers and biker mamas, combatants and civilians, middle-aged parents and the adult children who are finally pushing them aside and seizing power. The universe has been reconfigured. Juice no longer has the threat of government blackmail hanging over his head, but he owes Linc and the sheriff a huge favor. The mayor and the business community now have reason to actively despise Linc. Jax is running things now, but Clay still has a vote. Given the rampant sewing-circle bitchery that defined Season 4 of “Sons,” I can’t imagine that the new power dynamics will go down entirely smoothly, and that the club’s veteran members won’t resent being marginalized as “elder statesmen.”

And although your mileage will surely vary, I like that they’re keeping Clay around at the behest of the CIA, to ensure that the deal with the Irish Kings goes through. This is much less cliched than the standard “You killed my dad and now I will avenge him!” scenario. It also fits with the “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” ethos, and it gives Jax no choice but to accept his destiny and become the biker version of Michael Corleone or Hamlet, assuming control of a troubled kingdom that he was always fated to run anyway. (The title of this season-closing two-parter was “To Be.”) Keeping Clay alive also forces Tara, whose surgery career was ended by Parada’s (CIA?) goons anyway, a compelling reason to embrace her own dark destiny. They’re the club’s new power couple, usurping Clay and Gemma — and neither Clay nor Gemma will be too happy about that, I’m sure. (A side note: There was something oddly intimate and personal about the scene with Jax sitting by his father’s grave and putting those rings on his hand. It occurred to me that this was the episode in which Sutter, who learned his craft as a writer-producer on FX’s “The Shield,” made the transition from upstart show runner to elder statesman, and I laughed out loud at that shot of “The Shield” playing on the TV in Juice’s jail cell. Way to make it official, Sutter.)

The final 10 minutes of the episode — an almost wordless series of slow zooms set to a customized version of “House of the Rising Sun,” leading to Jax’s first use of the gavel — were damn near perfect, oddly combining a parable/horror movie sensibility and a voluptuously mournful Sergio Leone sense of rhythm. (The episode could have been called “Once Upon a Time in Charming.”) The climax also drove home — as if we need any reminders by this point — precisely what sort of show we’re watching. In a sense, the central locale of Charming, Calif., is not unlike the Harlan, Ky., of FX’s more laid-back “Justified” or the neo-noir Los Angeles of “The Shield” or — for that matter — the island on “Gilligan’s Island,” or Leone’s version of the 19th century West. It’s several degrees removed from recognizable reality. It’s set in a mostly metaphoric space. What’s plausible is whatever feels right — and most of the twists in last night’s episode felt right to me. A couple of months ago, I was joking that with this season’s emphasis on succession — and characters getting forcibly cast in social roles they didn’t want but couldn’t escape from — “Sons of Anarchy” was starting to remind me of that final reveal in “The Shining,” which suggested that the most recent caretaker of the Hotel Overlook had not just reenacted the fate of his predecessor, but in some sense truly was that guy. Viewers might have gotten this without Sutter superimposing the now-iconic black-and-white photo of Jax’s mom and dad over the shot of the newly ascended Jax and his now-committed-to-the-lifestyle wife, Tara, but no matter. On “Sons of Anarchy,” “on the nose” is often exactly right.

I laughed out loud at this ending. It was primordially manipulative. It reminded me of watching old “Captain America” serials on local TV as a kid. (Me: “Mom, is Captain America going to get cut in half by the buzz saw?” Mom: “I guess you’ll have to watch next week to find out, but for now I’ll just remind you that the thing is called ‘Captain America.’) It also parallels nicely with the adventure tales I’ve been reading to my young son at bedtime — the kinds of books that’ll end chapters with sentences like, “He held his sword in front of him, moving slowly down the long, dark hallway until he pushed open the door and revealed the most horrifying image imaginable.” My boy’s reaction to these Big Reveal is always the same: “Daddy, what happens next? Can we read just one more chapter?”

“Sons” operates on that level. If you didn’t already know that series creator Kurt Sutter learned his trade on FX’s cliffhanger-driven, plot-crazy “The Shield,” you might have figured it out eventually. The show already did a similar cliffhanger ending this season in the episode where Juice, besieged on all sides and deeply conflicted in his loyalties, wrapped a chain around his neck, climbed up in a tree and tried to lynch himself. The second his body dropped, the episode cut to black and rolled credits. If you had keen ears you probably caught the sound of the branch breaking, but if you didn’t, you had a reaction similar to my childhood distress at seeing Captain America lashed to a giant log in a sawmill. Oh, my God, they killed Juice!

At the same time, though, the series subverts its wild melodrama and dense thriller plotting with flashes of moral ambiguity and self-awareness. You root for these people as if they were your best friends, until the show makes you take a step back and admit how depraved and sickening they are. The sheer goofy intensity of the internal warfare this season has been addictive and oddly moving — especially the parts that dealt with the half-black Juice’s distress at being pulled into finkdom by the town’s new sheriff; Gemma (Katey Sagal) raging like a material warrior-queen at Clay’s viciousness and stupidity while simultaneously feeding her narcissistic desire to be the center of the drama; and Tara (Maggie Siff) falling into black depression over the botched kidnapping that shattered her hand and ended her career as a surgeon. (The only silver lining for Tara is that the accident seems to have cured her simpering doormat tendencies: whether she’s talking to Gemma, Jax or — in this episode — the glowering, super-scary Clay, she stares right into their faces with scorn instead of fear.) Season four of “Sons” is neck-and-neck with two in my season rankings, and it might claim the top slot depending on what happens next week. It’s top-shelf pulp.

Where do we go from here? Although I wouldn’t put an improbable last-minute save past Sutter and his writers, I suspect Clay’s a goner, and that the season finale will find Jax forced to choose between leaving Charming with his wife and family versus pulling a Michael Corleone and assuming control of the suddenly rudderless SAMCRO. (Jax is unquestionably the best leadership candidate now that Mark Boone’s Jr.’s Bobby Munson is in jail, courtesy of a vengeful sell-out by Kurt Sutter’s incarcerated Otto.)

But whether “Sons” kills off Clay next week, waits until later, or lets him live, the show will have cemented its main theme: the gravitational pull of family, or more accurately, the abstract and unreal ideal of family, which is what all ragtag band of self-interested criminals really has.

Opie really shouldn’t even have been around the Sons anymore after losing his wife to them, but the allure of belonging was so powerful that here he was years later doing the “Fool me twice, shame on you” thing opposite Clay, who’s become one of the most loathsome bad daddy figures since Powers Booth’s Cy Tolliver on “Deadwood.” Gemma shouldn’t have stayed with Clay all these years; even when they showed deep love for each other — I loved Gemma’s kiss-off of a kiss in this episode — they were both still a couple of slimy criminals who were ultimately inclined to look out for number one, and Gemma usually seemed to get the worst of the arrangement. And yet here she is trying to be a good Lady Macbeth — stirring every available pot for the good of the club, but really for the good of Gemma.  Jax is theoretically tied to the club forever by his father’s legacy, but he really means it when he says he wants out; unfortunately for him, on a show like “Sons,” that can’t happen. A leopard cannot change its spots, nor a biker his patches.

“Sons” isn’t a deep show and really isn’t striving to be one, but for a testosterone-poisoned potboiler, it’s complex and surprising. It lulls you into adopting the self-flattering points-of-view of the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club and its individual members, then suddenly drops in a scene in which an outsider injects a harsh dose of reality, forcing the characters (and you) to admit that most of these characters are scummy, selfish and often incredibly flaky people, and that if you weren’t experiencing the low-grade version of Stockholm Syndrome that comes from committing to a weekly series, you wouldn’t want to be near any of them. The scene in the baby mill — thunderous punches competing with the mewling of panicked infants — was a hilarious example of this: the Sons can’t seem to go anywhere without getting into a brawl or shooting somebody. Clay’s self-satisfied grin at being told that the brawl actually benefited the Irish Kings reminded me again of what a colossal screw-up he’s been this year; he and the club have made one idiotic and self-destructive decision after another, yet somehow they keep getting saved from themselves, and they usually seem to think it’s because of their innate bad-assness and fidelity to a code instead of recognizing it for what it is: sheer dumb luck.

A great example is the scene in last night’s episode between Jax (Charlie Hunnam) and Wendy (Drea de Matteo), the ex-junkie mother of Jax’s son Abel. She’s cleaned up and wants custody again. She tells Jax, “You’re a felon on release, and as frightening as this notion may be, I’m probably the most stable adult in Abel’s life.” Because we identify with the gang and consider everyone outside of it to be a menacing interloper, we sympathize with Jax’s appalled, defensive reaction. But of course she’s right. Their parting exchange could be read a couple of ways, neither of them flattering to Jax.  Wendy: “I ain’t goin’ anywhere.” Jax: “It’s OK — I am.” Jax is an awfully literal guy, but I think that last line intentionally had at least two meanings:  (1) I am going somewhere as a person, and you’ll always be a junkie tramp, and (2) I am literally going somewhere, meaning out of town with my family, leaving the Sons and you behind.  The nagging suspicion that he’s wrong on both counts gives the graphic novel-goofy “Sons of Anarchy” a certain tragic weight. Jax, the poor bastard, is just like all the other Sons: he rides thousands upon thousands of miles, cheating death at every turn, but in the larger, personal sense, he never gets anywhere.

Tonight’s installment of the boxing drama “Lights Out” (10 p.m./9 Central), “The Shot,” is a Get on the Train episode — modest and economical, yet so densely packed that I’ve seen it three times but continue to notice new things. (FX has posted the first couple of episodes here if you want to catch up.)

Created by Justin Zackham and executive produced by Warren Leight, the show runner of HBO’s “In Treatment,” “Lights Out” tells the story of Patrick “Lights” Leary, a 39-year-old former heavyweight who retired after an especially brutal fight. The series takes place five years after the match that ended Lights’ career. Intriguingly, the program avoids showing us exactly what happened in that ring; all we know is that it was a close fight, and that fans continue to argue about whether Lights or his opponent, Death Row Reynolds (Billy Brown), won. (Lights insist it was him — but there something defiant and slightly guarded about how he says it.)

Although Lights has a bit of a temper and can be almost comically stubborn, he’s a stable, dependable, decent guy and has been married to his wife, Theresa (Catherine McCormack), long enough to have had three daughters with her; the eldest is nearly college age. He’s managed by his younger brother, Johnny (Pablo Schreiber from Season 2 of “The Wire”). Johnny was a pro fighter for a while, but left boxing for as-yet-undisclosed reasons. Lights and Johnny’s dad, Pops (welcome back, Stacy Keach!), is an aging but still formidable trainer who runs a gym in Bayonne and is determined to mentor the next up-and-comer. 

At the center of everything is Lights,. His day-to-day existence is all about hustling to make every doller he can (a predicament that should speak to the lives of a Americans who have never seen a boxing match). Like many successful athletes, Lights earned a lot and let his standard of living rise too high, too fast. He’s got too many properties, too many projects, too many expenses. Although nobody in the show has said so yet, there’s clearly a gap between what Lights wants (or feels obligated to pay for) and what he actually needs. His wife and three daughters are used to a certain standard of living — thus the suburban McMansion and the private schools — but they haven’t said anything to indicate that they couldn’t live without those things if they had to; yet Lights works hard to provide them anyway, and to pay rent on the struggling gym that he built for Pops. We see him enduring a long, intrusive TV interview to prove himself on camera and maybe land a commentating gig, and picking up pocket money calling a local bingo game. In an intriguing twist that links “Lights Out” to pulp crime thrillers and film noir, Lights also starts doing big-money favors for a local crime boss — jobs that always end badly for Lights.

Through a fluke of pop culture timing, “Lights Out” premiered about two weeks after the release of David O. Russell’s movie “The Fighter,” a blue-collar melodrama about the rise of Boston’s “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg). The film might have hurt “Lights Out” by making it seem less special. The projects do have some things in common, including a fascination with the hard realities of money, and a keen grasp of how family ties can interfere with sports success — or even destroy it. (Both Micky and Lights have troubled brothers who were fighters once, and who view their more successful siblings with a mix of loyalty, love, jealousy and resentment.) But the film and the TV series feel different, and are interested in different things.

“Lights Out” has that touch of pulp I mentioned earlier (kid brother Johnny is a gladhanding, catnip-to-the-ladies hustler along the lines of Sidney Falco in “The Sweet Smell of Success,” and there’s an upcoming episode that revolves around an illegal cage fight!). But all in all, it’s more a realistically scaled drama than a he-man fantasy, more an unassuming, B-movie type of production than a prestige project, and more of a work show than a sports show. Lights’ business just happens to be hitting people, training others to hit people, and capitalizing on his past as an expert in hitting people; but in the end, it’s a job, and every major decision comes down to money. How much does the family need that week? How many thousands of dollars do they need to keep Pops’ gym open for another month, and what’s the fastest way to get it? Ethical concerns fall by the wayside when landlords are breathing down your neck. The characters might take moral shortcuts anyway, but their milieu — a sport that has always been joined at the hip to gangsterism of every sort — makes shortcuts the rule rather than the exception. (“Integrity?” Johnny grouses to Lights in tonight’s episode. “You kidding me? This is boxing!”)

The series is also about the difficulty of balancing work life against home life — how the first can overwhelm and even obliterate the second, and how antiquated male codes make things worse. In many ways Lights is almost a parody of the strong-silent type. He keeps too many secrets from Theresa (almost every problem in their marriage can be traced to Lights’ stoic refusal to let his wife know the extent of their money problems). He’s so genial and controlled that it’s always a bit shocking when he erupts into violence and reminds us that this is, after all, a man who is defined by his fists. The directors and editors convey Lights’ flashes of temper via flash cuts of previous acts of violence, showing you how they’re all connected, how they’re all expressions of the explosive life force that makes Lights a great boxer.

In tonight’s episode,  Lights’ eldest daughter, Ava (Meredith Hagner), walks out of an argument with her dad, goes into her room and slams the door. Lights starts pounding on it (as any parent might) but much harder than is necessary. He’s not reacting (or overreacting) to circumstance; he’s tapping a primal well. Episode director Ed Bianchi (who helmed some of the best episodes of “Deadwood”) cuts to glimpses of violence from previous episodes — quick shots of Lights in the ring with Death Row Reynolds and Lights getting in a stupid fight outside a bar with a drunken fool. His middle daughter, Daniella (Ryanne Shane), calls out to him, “Daddy …” and it seems to break the dark spell. Then Bianchi cuts to a wide shot of Lights in front of Ava’s door, small in the frame, center screen, Daniella standing in her doorway in the background smaller still, and in the left foreground, a painted portrait of the intact, happy family.

The thematic frame that encloses all of “Lights Out” has to do with legacy and memory. Although Lights rarely talks about it, he’s terrified of boxer’s dementia, an Alzheimer’s-like disease that destroys the memory, and worries that he’s already manifesting warning signs. (He forgets a lot of little things.) Tonight’s episode, which was written by Bryan Goluboff (“The Basketball Diaries,” ”In Treatment”), ties that fear in with the wider fear of growing old — a fear that wells en route to the inevitable as you see yourself turning grey and start wondering if you left a mark or not, if your life meant something or if it was all a lot of noise and motion, a big distraction.

“The Shot” is built around Lights’ impending 40th birthday. Goluboff and Bianchi intertwine Lights’ daughters’ creation of a biographical “memory book” about their dad with preparations for the gym’s first big title fight, an Atlantic City bout between an established super-middleweight and one of their own prospects, a young, talented, but annoyingly cocky Armenian-American named Omar Assarian (Pedro Pascal). You’ve seen pre-fight training sequences a million times, but the ones in this episode acquire a different shading, a new power, because they’re intercut with with the run-up to Lights’ birthday. Lights initially doesn’t want to get involved with fight prep because it’s his dad’s job, and because getting involved might call up bad old memories for Lights. But eventually he relents. And as Omar’s youthful petulance melts and we see his fear — and Lights’ patience as he shows Omar how to handle that fear — we can see a different future for Lights, one in which he departs the ring physically but stays in it philosophically, scrutinizing his own experience and passing knowledge to a new generation of boxers just as Lights the father passes down parental wisdom to his children.

The high point of the episode [SPOILERS AHEAD] is the last act — the finest 12 minutes I’ve seen on TV in years, and about as strong an illustration of the power of cross-cutting as you’ll ever see. Every minute, every second, every frame is held as long as it should be and not a moment longer; the filmmakers and actors attain an economy of gesture that’s truly transporting. What’s on-screen at first seems plain, simple, even corny. But if you watch it all again, you start to grasp the intricacies of its construction, and see how one shot or moment mirrors or intensifies another. When Omar, Pops and Johnny leave the dressing room to head to the arena, and Johnny tells Omar, “You were born for this,” the episode cuts to a close-up of the memory book (the cover says “Birthday”) being opened in honor of Lights’ 40th celebration. As the hero flips through the book, flashing back over his life, we cut back to Atlantic City. Omar’s team enters the arena, and Omar himself enters the sacred mental space that Lights warned him about earlier when he led the young fighter into a supply closet, turned out the lights and told him that when you enter the ring (literal or figurative) you leave everything else behind — home, money, family, friends. It’s just you and your opponent.

As we look into Lights’ face as he leafs through the birthday book, savoring memories that will one day fade from his mind, we realize who his greatest opponent really is.