Sons of Anarchy

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.

Last night’s “Sons” episode, titled “Hands,” attained a merciless “Sopranos”-like power that trumped this year’s two big Juice episodes. And it made similar points about the illusion of freedom in the criminal world.

The episode’s agenda was signaled in that early sequence at the gas station in which Jax made small talk with the motorcycle cop about his bike. The officer confessed that he liked the old model better, but this one was easier on his bad back. “Maybe it’s time to trade it in for a cage, huh?” Jax said, meaning a car. “When I’m dead,” the cop replied. “Amen to that,” Jax answered.

It was a moment of random camaraderie between crook and cop, but it resonated throughout the episode, which treated the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club, the town of Charming, and the criminal life itself as gigantic cages in which all the characters were trapped — perhaps without possibility of escape. Clay, the club’s president, desperately wants to be released, but he’s going to have to sell out the club and everybody in it to make his dream come true — and he probably will, if he doesn’t get exposed as a manipulative scumbag and murdered first. His vice-president, Jax, wants out, too; by the end of the episode he has confessed that urge to Opie, and shamefacedly admitted that when he talked Opie out of his own exit strategy, he effectively signed Donna’s death warrant. Poor Tara is in love with Jax but wants out of the life, even though she knows she’s not allowed to admit it; she tried to physically escape — symbolically, that’s what the job interview in Providence was about — and ended up the victim of a kidnap-murder attempt touched off by the fiendish, ass-covering sociopathic schemer, Clay. By the end of the episode she was bedridden, one of her delicate surgeon’s hands shattered — probably beyond repair. The combination of violent trauma and pain medication pushed the truth out of her.

The attack, she told Jax, was “… fate … We’re supposed to be together, right? But you can’t leave here … The club won’t let you. Gemma won’t let you. Charming won’t let you … The only way I can be with you is if I lose my way out. I lost that today, baby. My dead hand. No one will want me now, no one. I’ll never save another life again. I’ll never fix a tiny heart. It’s OK, because now we can be together. You. Me.” And here she turned tearful and bitterly sarcastic: “Gemma. Here in beautiful Charming. Happy family. Maybe I should smash my other hand. I get to stay home and be mom.” By the end she’s screaming at Jax: “Get out!”

You can say that Kurt Sutter’s show is turgid or nasty, brilliant or overrated, but you can’t say it has no moral point of view on its characters. Even though it mostly avoids narrative hand-holding, it’s as moral — at times verging on moralistic — as “The Sopranos” or any classic gangster film. The heat in last night’s episode was purgatorial. As directed by Peter Weller and written by Chris Collins, David Labrava and Sutter, “Hands” was acutely aware of the repressive power that the club exerts over all of its members — even Clay, who’s the season’s only out-and-out villain — as well as the power that other institutions and ways of thinking exert beyond the club. The script casually linked the club’s ingrained racism with the subtler institutionalized racism of American law enforcement; the town’s black sheriff, Eli Roosevelt, was revealed to be a virtual slave to the white assistant U.S. attorney Lincoln Potter, bound by a contract to do pretty much whatever he was ordered to do. (“I’m done being your boy,” Eli told Linc, then apologized to Juice in a moment whose racial solidarity was more powerful for being understated.) Both Tara and Gemma were confirmed as prisoners of gender — collateral damage from the striving and showdowns of selfish, macho guys. Gemma tried to interfere in Clay’s clumsy campaign of terror and received a horrendous beating for her trouble; it was preceded by Clay’s icy statement that she was not a member of the club, but an Old Lady, and that he should remind her of her place more often.

As she prayed for Tara’s recovery in the hospital chapel, Gemma got called out for daring to think herself more free or moral than the thugs that destroyed a young surgeon’s hand: “You’re an awful woman, and all this suffering landing on Tara, it’s because of you.” This was truth, just as Tara’s tearful excoriation of Jax was truth. SAMCRO brought them all to this. The thing they all love is repressing them, twisting them, killing them, because that’s what it does. By the end of the episode, Gemma had resolved to have Clay murdered “by the hand of a Son” because — as she’d already been reminded this season — “Clay can’t be saved.” But having Clay murdered won’t liberate her, either. She’ll still be a prisoner of the allure of the club, the allure of the lifestyle, the cage of the open road. These characters all inhabit their own cages; some inhabit cages within cages within cages. Few will escape.

“If my mom and dad were alive, this Emmy snub would kill them,” he said. “That’s not true, they were too old to understand my show. Just like the Academy.” And, “Broke into an Academy member’s porn locker. Found sticky fully-clothed photos of Mariska Hargitay, Kathy Bates…and ['Mad Men'] creator Matt Weiner. Very odd.” Even Fox’s feel-good musical fantasy wasn’t safe from his ire: ”Fuck ‘Glee.’ Hate those annoying, ‘Please accept me for who I am’ singing brats. There, I said it. are you happy?”

Sutter later backtracked a bit on some of his sentiments. But soon after, he caught flak for suggesting that the departure of “The Walking Dead” show runner Frank Darabont was a result of its cable network AMC spending too much on “Mad Men” and overpaying Matthew Weiner. “Why Darabont got fired — Weiner,” tweeted Sutter. “He held AMC hostage, broke their bank, budgets were slashed, shit rolled down hill onto ['Breaking Bad' creator Vince] Gilligan and Frank. No one else wants to fucking say it, but the greed of ‘Mad Men’ is killing the other two best shows on TV — ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Walking Dead.’” Sutter subsequently admitted he had no inside knowledge of AMC’s financial decisions, apologized to — well, most of Hollywood, it seems –and then quit Twitter for a few weeks. He offered a partial mea culpa on his blog: ”No one chased me away except me … Eventually, I would have said something that got me or someone else buried in a suffocating pile of irrevocable toxic man shit.”

All this craziness was happening during the run-up to the fourth season of “Sons of Anarchy,” which so far has been both a ratings smash (the numbers for the premiere were the biggest in the show’s history) and a critical success. The new plotlines focus on the show’s hometown of Charming, a 21st century domestic Eden that’s being remade by a new mayor who’s also the area’s biggest real estate developer, and overrun by county law enforcement and feds who hope to ensnare the gang in a racketeering case. The new episodes are engaging, complexly plotted, richly atmospheric, over-the-top soapy and often deliriously cinematic. Thus far, Season 4 of “Sons” has been altogether more engaging than Season 3, which took the characters to Ireland for a change of scenery and back story about the roots of the show’s murderous, gun-running and now drug-smuggling bike gang, the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original Charter (SAMCRO). The show’s problematic but ambitious third season has its defenders, though — and in retrospect I appreciate it more, because its plot helps drive so much of the action in Season 4.

I got into all of this in a long phone interview with Sutter, during which we also discussed the show’s disreputable aura, Sutter’s penchant for making trouble for himself, the morality of crime stories, his obsession with “Deadwood” and the “Godfather” films, and other subjects.

What kind of feedback are you getting from “Sons of Anarchy” viewers right now?

Everyone is very excited about the season. There’s not much of a gray area. I think when you create the persona of someone who is very candid and says what’s on your mind, as I have, you have to be willing to accept feedback in the same vein. People are usually pretty upfront and candid about the show, and fortunately the feedback [on the new season] has been really strong. People are enjoying the dynamics that are happening within the club, they love all the stuff that’s happening in Charming with the new law enforcement and the pending RICO case. So I think they see the fun and excitement of all those external pressures affecting everything else inside the club.

The verdict on Season 3 seemed to be a lot more mixed, not just from critics but from a lot of viewers. I fell into that camp. But a lot of the stuff that the show’s writers are doing in Season 4 is starting to turn me around on Season 4, because it makes it seem as though this might turn out to be one of those shows that turns out to have what I call “a memory like an elephant.”

Right.

It seems like you planted stuff [in Season 3] and now it’s flowering.

Last season, narratively … To take people out of Charming and to reveal some of the mythology and back story in Belfast … Look, you know, ultimately, as a writer and producer I thought they were all extraordinary episodes [in Season 3]. I felt like the quality of the show never [declined] from what we’ve done [before]. But the fact that we were veering away from what people had come to expect, that was a bit of a risk.

That’s interesting, and it’s a good thing, because I never saw it as being a risk. I’ve always been fascinated by the mythology component of the show. And because we never use the device of flashbacks or anything like that, you really have to find organic ways to reach back and tell those stories.

That was my way of doing that in Season 3 — all the things we play out in Season 3, in terms of the history of the club and the depth of it, and all that back story. Because of that, the things we play out in Season 4 have deeper resonance. [Now] people understand the dynamic with Gemma and [Jax's biological mother] Maureen, because we saw it play out last season. We can see why Jax is estranged from his dad because we saw it play out last season. We aren’t just telling the audience what to think about the events in this back story; they’ve seen it all play out within the club. I do think that because of what we did in Season 3, we have a better foundation to build on in Season 4.

Now, that was not my intention! It was not my intention to create a season that would just lay track for the next season. But that has perhaps been the result.

As I look at those two seasons back to back — as, unintentionally, a Part 1 and Part 2 — it seems like Season 4 of “Sons of Anarchy” has kind of gone in the opposite direction of Season 3, with a vengeance. Whereas originally you had taken the characters very far away from home, to Ireland, now you’ve made the action very compact and centered. In episodes 4 through 6 of this season, which viewers have either recently seen or are about to see, the vast majority of the action happens in a handful of locations, mostly near or physically within the clubhouse or within the doctor’s office. And it’s so much about the politics of the club, the business end of things, the rules of succession. In a perverse way, “Sons of Anarchy” is turning into a workplace show.

Some of that is determined by budget and where we’ve filmed stuff. Our model for the show is usually four days on home set and three days out. Sometimes we’ll have an episode that has a lot of big action scenes that will chew up two of our days on location, and we really have to be aware of that and write the show, not necessarily change the show, but write it to home sets.

But I think your point is well served, because this season is about the club, it’s about Charming, it’s about seeing Jax in all those familiar places that he’s ultimately trying to extract himself from. All of that has a lot of weight.

Could we take a side trip and get into Jax’s character a little bit? It seems in many ways that he’s the key to the show, because the actor who plays him, Charlie Hunnam, seems like such a traditional leading man sort of actor, in that he’s easy on the eyes and projects sort of a “nice action hero” vibe. But then he turns around and commits acts of violence that are so shocking and so casual — and it happens all the time.  I get comfortable with Jax, and think of him as almost the show’s audience surrogate, and then I am reminded that he’s as nasty as the others.

Right.

I think about this in context of the show as a whole, where not only are you not drawing a line between us, meaning the audience, and them, meaning the bikers, it seems as if you are trying to erase that line whenever possible. What’s the motivation behind that? What do you gain from doing it that way, and what do you lose?

I think that — and this has been the case from the beginning — this is a show that’s about family, you know? Albeit family that exists in a culture that most of us don’t know, with a set of rules that we’ve never lived by. But ultimately they are still a family. That’s what has enabled me to keep them relatable and real and likable.

And yet they are who they are. They have a credo, and they’re able to compartmentalize things that we aren’t able to compartmentalize, and then move into violence with a certain ease and casualness. “Erasing the line” is an interesting way to describe it.

Here’s something I find interesting. We’re doing this whole story line on Juice, who we discover is half black. He’s afraid he’s going to be thrown out of the club because of it.

This is a subject that we’ve never done a full-on story on within the context of the show. We’ve laid track to it for three seasons — [pointing out] that you’ve never seen a black guy in the club, and that there are rules of the [motorcycle club] prohibiting that.

What I’m finding is that fans are willing to forgive these guys being murderers and gun runners and now drug runners, but they hate the fact that they’re potentially racists!

Yeah!

[Laughs] It’s almost like that hits too close to home for most people. It’s an interesting psychological study, watching people in social media react to that.

Racism is a more everyday sort of outrage that the other behavior depicted on the show. “I might be a murderer” is not something most people worry about. “I might be a racist” is a different story.

It always comes down to character, to me — to the emotional makeup of these characters. Even when you have characters you know are doing things that are nefarious, when you see the emotionality behind it, when you see them have these very recognizable emotional experiences and see their very real reactions to them, they just become humanized.

There’s an innate connection that the audience has. They are experiencing the pain or the anger or the frustration or the absurdities with these guys because I am able to write to that, and because I have a cast that is able to take it and articulate it and raise the bar a few notches, actors who play the hell out of it, who make it real.

There is absolutely nothing in the show that indicates that we are supposed to condemn any of these characters, or disapprove of any of their behavior, or indeed any indication of what’s the proper attitude to take toward these characters. You’re not cueing anybody. When I think about all the other great TV shows that focused to some degree on criminality, including great past shows like “The Sopranos” and “Deadwood,” they all prompted you at some point to weigh the criminal behavior against normal behavior, by contrasting the criminals’ behavior against law-abiding civilians. You really don’t do that on “Sons of Anarchy,” and it seems deliberate. 

Ultimately it’s not a deliberate thing.

With the law enforcement component we’ve set up, maybe it’s just coming from my roots on “The Shield,” but I like creating these characters who are as conflicted and flawed as the outlaws. [Former Charming Police Chief Wayne] Unser made a pact with [SAMCRO boss] Clay Morrow years ago. with the understanding that, “Here is what we’re going to do to make our town safe.” And then you’ve got that whole story line later with this ATF agent who’s gone rogue and who gets her comeuppance. Our law enforcement characters have been as flawed as our outlaws.

But I do think that, if you look at “The Sopranos” and see the brutality of Tony Soprano and the way he cheated on his wife, Tony was a much more compromised guy, and not anywhere near to being as plugged into his own family as Clay is with his family.

It’s my experience from spending time with these [motorcycle gang] guys that it is a much more insular family dynamic than we see reflected in most outlaw characters on television. The [motorcycle club] community is tightly wound. That’s why it’s very rare — it has happened, but it’s rare — that you see any of these people flip [and become informants]. It’s not about blood. There is a level of achievement that you have to reach and maintain in order to stay in these clubs. It’s not just about being born into it, and having it all come out of blood. You have to earn your spot.

Speaking of outlaws, are there any westerns that you think about a lot when you’re working on the show? And are there any gangster movies?

When I was conceiving the pilot with [filmmaker and veteran "Sopranos" director] Allen Coulter, who shot the original pilot, we definitely were using some archetypes of the old West. Clearly I’m a huge “Deadwood” fan. I’ve used pretty much every actor on my show who appeared on that show!

Yeah, you have!

“Deadwood” is clearly an influence. In terms of gangster movies, when I do steal, I try to steal from the best. There are a lot of “The Godfather, Part II” themes, especially in the idea of a guy wanting out [of a criminal subculture] but who is too deeply enmeshed, too deeply committed to the idea of The Family. That’s Jax, who is a guy who wants to get out, but who perhaps is a guy who thinks too deeply and feels to much to survive in this life. How does a guy with that emotional makeup succeed in this kind of life? We reveal last season that his dad didn’t really even want him in the life. This season, in one of the episodes, I make reference to the famous Michael-Fredo scene in the rowboat.

Can we talk about Clay Morrow for a minute? He was never the most sentimental character in the history of the world, but I feel like we’re getting to sense the depths of his selfishness this seasons in a way we didn’t before — particularly in the episode where he tells Mark Boone Junior’s character, Bobby Munson, that he wants to push him as a successor after Clay retires if Bobby supports him on the vote; and then you have that moment later in that episode that’s very chilling, the moment where Bobby watches Clay from afar and realizes he’s a very skilled liar who pulled the wool over Bobby’s eyes, just as Clay is now pulling the wool over the eyes of the person he’s talking to at that particular moment in time.

Clay is a guy who probably has the deepest, darkest secret. He sees his days numbered sitting at the end of that table. He has his exit strategy in place. He has a singular vision. He’s a military guy, a soldier. He has that one mission on his mind, and he gonna follow it through to the end.

The older these guys get — and I’ve known a few of them — the more they are able to compartmentalize, to sort of remove themselves from the violence they’ve committed on the rest of the world. They have that ability. And that’s what’s happening with Clay. Nobody is going to stop him from achieving his goal. You have two guys with exit strategies — Clay and Jax — who are eventually going to come to cross-purposes as they try to achieve those [goals].

It’s ironic that almost every one of Clay’s pronouncements to the club comes back to the issue of loyalty, yet the only person Clay is truly loyal to is Clay.

Exactly. I know a lot these guys, and some of them have become friends. Yet everything that Jax is saying this year reflects my experience of that dynamic: “Is it really all about loyalty, or at the end of the day does it all just come back to fucking greed?”

Yeah.

Unfortunately, that was [club co-founder] John Teller‘s dynamic, in terms of why he thought the club lost its way. When you live on the fringe too long, you ultimately attract people who have chosen that lifestyle. You can’t avoid it.

I think that’s absolutely true about Clay. Jax calls him on it: “You fuckin’ pushed a guy off the roof for the same thing.” And Clay justifies it: “Well, but that guy was a rat!” Jax is right. Ultimately everything Clay was doing was exactly what [Sons of Anarchy Northern Ireland president Keith] McGee was doing. He was old, he was tired, he felt like, “I put in all this time, and all I want is a fucking piece.”

That’s what Clay is doing. Ultimately that will continue to reveal itself to other members of the club as well.

I’ve got to ask you about the “Terror of Twitter” incidents from earlier this year. Among other subjects in this interview, we’ve talked about how you don’t tell people how they’re supposed to feel about the morality of the world you’re depicting on the series, and how the morality of individual characters fluctuates from scene to scene depending on what they want at any given moment. Do you think either of these factors has anything to do with the lack of industry acclaim for “Sons of Anarchy”?

Look, I am clearly a guy who needs some filters, you know?

[Laughs]

I say that flippantly, but my initial response to the Emmys the year before was much more visceral and angry response. This season — look, was I upset? Yeah. I was kind of shocked, quite frankly, that Katey [Sagal] didn’t get some kind of nod from the Emmys, because she did win a Golden Globe. But the tweets I sent out on the whole Academy thing, quite honestly, were just snarky, and they were not coming from a place of malice in the way that my blog did in Season 2, when I was really pissed off. Critically the response was mixed to the Belfast story line. I was just blowing off steam and making jokes. Did they get taken out of context? Yes. Did they get turned against me? Absolutely.

But the reality is, I should know better. I should know better at this point that when I say anything regarding the Academy [of Television Arts and Sciences], that it’s going to be taken at face value, that it’s going to become what it is. At the end of the day I can’t really get upset because I should just fuckin’ know better!

I’m not asking any of this because I want your interview with Salon to be another stop on the Kurt Sutter apology tour–

Right, right, right.

I know you regret the fact that you made those statements. But to put it as delicately as possible, isn’t there a bit of truth to the sentiments you expressed in those tweets, and last year on your blog? And if you are getting that kind of reaction to the show, might it be due to the sort of show that it is?

Absolutely.

I ended up having a long conversation with [FX boss John] Landgraf about this. There are a lot of factors that determine who gets Emmy nods. There are lot of people from all different branches voting on these things. And it’s why, quite frankly — and I say this not to take anything away from them as shows — the costume dramas do very well, because they attract pretty much every area of the business that votes on shows, from costumes to set design to lighting. There are lot more bells and whistles on those shows that attract votes.

We have to work incredibly hard on our show to get it to look like nobody is working hard on our show. Honestly — and I don’t just say this because I love all the people who work for me — it is as difficult, perhaps more difficult, to have set design and costume design and lighting and editing and music that does not call attention to itself, that does not move out ahead of the words, that becomes backdrop and support for stories, so that you are not aware of them. There is nobody in the industry taking notice of [what we're doing] because it’s done, intentionally, to disappear, to just become the fabric of the show. That was our experience on “The Shield,” where we worked hard to make it look as if nobody was doing anything at all. That’s my experience here, too.

And I honestly feel an even bigger part of this is the subject matter, dude. We deal in a world, and with subject matter, that makes some people uncomfortable, and they would rather sit back and watch “The Good Wife” or “Mad Men” or something that feels somewhat nostalgic or familiar or safe. You gotta fuckin’ tighten your belt and put on a pair of heavy shoes to watch my show. And a lot of people don’t wanna fuckin’ do that.

In terms of the voting dynamic, in the end it’s numbers. It’s percentages. But I think it’s a testament to the quality of everyone involved with the show that after four seasons, they continue to not only show up and do the work, but be motivated and inspired to do the work better … It’s easy for me to get excited about the work because I’m sitting at the head of the train, you know? When I walk through the lot and see all my actors and see all my crew and see that they’re genuinely excited and want to do good, and want to do better? That’s rare. It’s really rare.

Because of that, we continue do good work, we continue to attract viewers, we continue to defy the odds. To see a show that’s been on the air four seasons do the kind of numbers we did [in this year's premiere] is kind of amazing on a lot of levels.

It’s also interesting that you are doing well in the ratings after four seasons despite the fact that, to my eyes, you are doing almost nothing in terms of audience hand-holding to bring people up to speed on the plot, and to find some easily digestible way to explain exactly what happened in seasons one through three. As you mentioned before, you don’t even do flashbacks.

No. We don’t. Any of those devices kind of feel like they pull people out of the reality of it, you know? The closest we got to that was last season was in the explosion scene last season, where Jax has the flash of John Teller when he’s looking at Clay. And even that was too borderline-supernatural for us. Flashbacks are a device that I love creatively. I am a huge “Lost” fan, and when other shows do flashbacks, sometimes it works great. I just know that on this show, it’s a device that would not necessarily enhance the drama.

You’re asking a lot when you ask people to follow a story that’s told that way. There are a lot of TV shows that I can kind of half-watch while I’m doing other stuff and not worry that I missed much, but on this show, if I look away for two minutes, I don’t know what’s going on.

[Laughs] Well, a lot of that is just the reality of having to squeeze so much information into 42 minutes. We write it in such a way that people have to be paying attention. But that also speaks to the dedication fans have for the show. This is not a show you can watch while multitasking. You can’t sit there and watch it while you’re answering your email. You have to be there, and be plugged in, and give up the hour.

If you trying to persuade hypothetical viewers who had never seen a frame of “Sons of Anarchy,” and who might not normally be interested in that kind of subject matter, to take a look at it, what would you tell them?

It’s a show about the journey of the family, and the everyday challenges of family life. Relationships. Money. Children. The characters face all the same problems the rest of us struggle with every day. But their solutions to them usually involve a gun.

The opening and closing montages are the highlights. As written by series creator Kurt Sutter and directed by TV veteran Paris Barclay (who’s also an executive producer this season), they’re modeled on major sequences of the “Godfather” films. At their best they attain a tattooed cracker version of those movies’ operatic bigness, contrasting moments of undeniable tenderness, fellowship and charm with shocking amorality and horror-show violence. They remind us that “Sons of Anarchy” is one of the few truly cinematic series on TV, capable of laying out a lot of information with little dialogue.

The curtain-raising montage in “Out” runs for over seven minutes. The first completely audible line of dialogue doesn’t appear until the halfway mark. The actors’ faces and bodies and the compositions that enclose them carry the weight of the storytelling: a shot of Jax’s torso festooned with shiv scars; a wide shot of the gang, newly paroled, turning to face an exit door that has just opened, blasting the room with sunlight; a close-up of blood welling out from beneath a cell door that tilts up to reveal a prison guard discovering the mess, setting up a plot point that will flower in the episode’s closing sequence; a close-up of the back of a bald black man’s head in a barber shop, which pans to reveal the town’s new chief law enforcement officer, San Joaquin sheriff Eli Jefferson (Rockmond Dunbar of “Prison Break”), smiling at his own reflection; a brief shot of the new Assistant U.S. Attorney, Lincoln Potter (Ray McKinnon, the doomed reverend from “Deadwood”), whose uncreased leather jacket, long hair and cigarette confirm that he’s not your standard-issue tight-assed fed. Every shot is like this: terse, functional, lovely. The sequence is as tight as a rocking chair built without nails.

The rest of the episode is nearly as strong. The gang goes home and finds that Charming has changed. Mayor Jacob Hale has masterminded a scheme to gentrify the town — a great touch that underlines another one of this show’s strengths, its distaste for the invisible shackles placed on anyone who lives outside society’s norms. The shot of Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman) staring at a luxury condominium sign has a iconic feel that links this show to classic westerns. The newly-sprung Sons on their hogs might as well be the an 1880s outlaw gang riding through territory that had been desolate before and discovering railroad track stretched from horizon to horizon.  Clay’s arthritis has gotten worse — so bad that he’s becoming that indestructible crime thriller archetype, the greying lion who has to make one last big score and then retire. But before he does that, he wants to push back against the sheriff, the U.S. attorney and the mayor. Clay’s scheme to spoil the development dovetails with a couple of other subplots involving a shipment of arms that the Sons want to steal from Russians and sell to a Mexican gang. It all twists together — braids, practically — in that closing montage, which is unfortunately set to yet another cover version of the way-overworked “What a Wonderful World,” but is so expertly constructed that it dazzles anyway. (There’s a glimpse of white picket fence in the ghastly final shot, but only a glimpse.)

The post-”Sopranos” TV landscape is filled with shows that traffic in moral relativism, and that desperately want to re-create that push-pull effect that you get from really strong gangster films and crime thrillers — the kind where you spend a large part of the story caring very much about the main characters, then suddenly recoil in horror at whatever outrage they’ve committed and feel appalled with yourself for caring about them. “Sons of Anarchy” is very much in that mode (so was “The Shield,” the show that Sutter worked on before this one).

But what separates “Sons of Anarchy” from almost every other program of its type — including “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” — is that it puts you right in the middle of its outlaw characters’ lives and encourages you to understand their world not from from the outside in (the norm for TV crime series) but from the inside out. You’re not watching a good man become a bad man, the arc of “Breaking Bad.” Nor are you scrutinizing gangsters or crooked cops with an almost anthropological detachment, which was usually the case on “The Sopranos” and “The Shield.” The “Sons” characters aren’t good guys or bad guys; they are quite simply our guys (and girls). They’re us. They’re you. When they play with their kids or dote on their significant others — the scenes between Clay and his old lady Gemma (Katey Sagal) are especially tender and convincing; Sagal should have already won an Emmy for her work on “Sons” — you never feel that horror film chill that you sometimes got while watching the Corleones, or the Hill family in “GoodFellas.” The images of domestic warmth are sincere and straightforward. So are the moments of gruff male friendship, which have a touch of Sam Peckinpah about them. (Sagal, Perlman, Mark Boone Junior, Kim Coates, Dayton Callie — is there anybody over 40 on this show that Peckinpah wouldn’t have cast in a western?) 

All of which should make the gang’s violent acts seem like mere plot points — nothing to get  worked up about. Yet the effect (on me at least) is the opposite: I’m more appalled by what these characters do in the name of money and loyalty than I would be if the show had given me a protected position from which to study them. When I hear Clay griping about how the mayor and his real estate cronies want to price working people out of their own hometown, the scene resonates with me, because I fear the same thing happening to my family; but his solution is so ghastly, and it’s arrived at so casually, that it’s impossible to approve of. It’s as if your dad complained for the ten thousandth time about the guy across the street who keeps running his lawnmower every Sunday morning, then hauled out a hatchet and said, “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” Watching the show’s de facto protagonist, Jax — a handsome action hero, tender lover and devoted dad — repeatedly stab a man to death in this episode in the woods behind an outdoor wedding reception is startling, because he’s not some just some random biker thug. He’s your representative, your idealized reflection. He’s you.

When the notoriously hotheaded Sutter bitched in his Twitter stream that awards groups neglected “Sons of Anarchy” because they were too old to understand the show, he misunderstood the nature of their disdain. They got the show, all right, and it creeped them out — as well it should have. Sutter, Barclay and company aren’t making conventional entertainment that jostles viewers’ moral certitude just a little bit, then returns them to whatever mental safe house they were hold up in during the rest of the week. They’re not viewing criminals from a detached middle class intellectual perspective, as “The Sopranos” and so many other great cable series did. “Sons” is more interested in visceral sensations and big emotions. Its writers and directors are working in the same vein as Peckinpah, Walter Hill (“The Long Riders”) and modern splatter auteur Rob Zombie, whose whacked-out 2005 film “The Devil’s Rejects” feels like this show’s gothic horror stepdaddy.  (Seriously, look at this.) You’re not supposed to approve of these people. You’re supposed to see yourselves in them, then imagine what you might be capable of.  That’s why I love this show even when it’s stumbling around like a headless chicken. It believes in the story it’s telling and expects everyone watching the series not just to have a good time, but to commit. If every drama series had a tenth as much passion, TV would be a far more interesting place.