TV review: 'Sons of Anarchy' gets your motor runnin'

That I have never ridden a motorcycle is just one of the many ways in which I am not cool. But I have seen "The Wild One," "Easy Rider" and "The Great Escape," so I understand something about the symbolic weight, cultural import and really big noise of the hog, the chopper, the bike. And I grew up on the Hardy Boys and old Marx Brothers movies, so I know something about running with a gang.

I have also watched cable television, where the success of "The Sopranos" taught TV makers that not only could successful series be made about bad, dangerous people, but that such series could at once earn critical respect and sexy up the brand. In shows like "Deadwood" and "Brotherhood," lawlessness becomes a law unto itself; in "The Shield" and "Dexter" the cops rewrite the rules. "Breaking Bad," "Weeds" and "The Riches" all have criminal, if comical, heroes. Even "Nip/Tuck" -- in which the characters rearrange their clients' faces -- fits that bill.

FX, home of "The Shield," "Nip/Tuck," and the messed-up-firefighters series "Rescue Me," has made some hay from tales of violent or otherwise toxic men and the women who fit their lives around them. Its latest offering, "Sons of Anarchy,” follows the fortunes of a motorcycle gang known as SAMCRO, a military-style abbreviation for the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original. Putting aside questions of quality -- I don't mean to say it isn't good, because it is -- the premise is almost mathematically obvious, given the times, so much so that HBO has its own biker series in the works.

SAMCRO literally gets away with murder in the fictional northern California town of Charming (fictional population: 14,679), located in the vicinity of the real town of Hollister, where in 1947 a motorcycle rally gone out of bounds inspired sensational headlines (and, some years later, "The Wild One"). As created by Kurt Sutter, a writer and executive producer on "The Shield," the Sons of Anarchy are an outlaw band, both "realistic" and, inevitably, romanticized. (That happens when you get writers and actors involved.) To keep them likable enough to sustain a series, he makes them moral on their own terms and surrounds them with characters less palatable or righteous than they are: white-supremacist, meth-dealing rivals; crooked cops. Call it the Sopranos Method.