“Sons of Anarchy” has the best start-to-finish season of anything I saw over the past year. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the pleasure of actually starting said season until last Tuesday, when the DVD set finally hit the market. Better late than never, I suppose.

Like many other people, I saw the commercials for “Sons” before it aired its initial season, and said to myself, “Nah. Not for me. A show about a biker gang? No way.” No one ever accused me of being smart. By the time Season 2 rolled around, enough critics that I respected were singing the show’s praises and using cool-sounding acronyms like SAMCRO in their reviews and making me think that, once again, I’d overlooked a great show. “Sons” is about biker gangs in the way that “The Wire” is about police officers. In other words, what’s seemingly simple on the surface belies the complexity underneath.

And so, after my exhaustive Spring of recaps, I put “Sons” on my “Must Watch” List for the summer, adding it to other seminal shows such as the aforementioned “Wire,” “Deadwood,” “Party Down,” and a host of other shows that I didn’t get around to initially due to time, lack of proper cable channels, or just the lack of understanding that this was a show that would hit me in the intellectual and/or emotional gut. I’ve loved catching up on all of those shows, but I think “Sons” hit my pleasure centers the most often and to greatest effect.

To call the show “Shakespearean” is neither original nor off-base: in the central figures of Clay Morrow, Gemma Teller Morrow, and Jax Teller, the show has an amalgam of all of The Bard’s greatest plays: a little “Hamlet” here, a little “MacBeth” there, a sprinkle of “King Lear” over there. Were one of them to say “My kingdom for a Harley!” it would not sound terribly out of place. “Sons” shares the tragedy of those three plays, and a host of others, in drawing out the world of a biker gang and the town it calls home: Charming, Calfornia. Naturally, no one in this town is leading a particularly charmed life.

While it lacks the poetic language of “Deadwood” and the tight plotting of “The Wire,” it does have some of the most muscular acting and action of any show currently on television. All too often, shows mistake “aloofness” for “art,” making its characters inscrutable in the service of trying to affect a deepness that masks a hollow center. In “Sons,” it’s usually clear what motivates a character, even if that character is unable to express it. Indeed, so much of Season 2, which built upon the groundwork laid in Season 1, features a culture that once relied on each other for strength sinking under the burden of individual weights that they feel unable to share with each other. As such, the season is structured almost like a jazz piece: teasing out tension over the first two-thirds of the way only to yield to a cathartic release that allows the group to finally reconnect with each other.

Trying to sum up the first two seasons in one simple review is both impossible and unfair. What I will say is that if you’re not squeamish, and cherish shows that are above all about character, than this show is for you. When it tries to function as a tightly-plotted show that shows the club under fire from rival gangs (foreign and domestic) as well as the local/federal law enforcement, the show sometimes paints its protagonists into impossible corners only to let them out and almost immediately to shove them into another corner. These plots are by and large great, but a distant second to the personal drama it tells about people in situations foreign to our own but going through the types of problems that are all too familiar.

I watched each season in about three sittings each, devouring episode after episode. What kept me coming back wasn’t the intricacies of gun-running and the hierarchical structure of SAMCRO’s internal by-laws, but the complicated internal relationship between club members as well as those touched (good and bad) by the life this club leaves in its wake. Trying to sum up each individual character’s arc would take far too long in so short a summary, but “Sons” does a fantastic job of not only delineating every biker’s role within the club, but also delineating how much the club means to that particular member. I’m always a fan of shows about families bound by more than blood. To me, SAMCRO is in some ways Buffy’s Scooby Gang with more leather. (Unless we’re counting Alternate Universe Willow, who is still not as scary as Gemma at her most badass.)

To compare the issues of “Sons” with another show, one can look at the problems of Clay Morrow and Don Draper as oddly similar. Both enjoyed a great stretch of time biding by their own rules, but have suffered increasingly under the glare of the outside world. There’s obviously a big difference between the ATF and The New York Times, but try telling that to two men that refuse to see just how much the times are a-changin’. Clay might enjoy being off the radar in Charming, but he’s also fond of being a big fish in a small pond, counting on historical inertia to keep SAMCRO’s hold over the town. Unfortunately, time has a way of marching on, as evidenced not only by Clay’s arthritic hands but also the encroachment of the rest of the world on the town’s borders.

His stepson Jax, along with Deputy Chief David Hale, represent the central question asked of so many generational dramas: Can people change, or are they doomed to repeat the same mistakes? Clay and Chief of Police Wayne Unser represent one possible path for these two men. While neither Jax nor Hale seemingly want to follow in those footsteps, they keep coming across real-life moments that buck theoretical concerns. Jax sees a different future for SAMCRO, one outlined in his dead father’s manuscript, but keeps falling back into repeated bouts of violence that contradict his own impulses. Hale sees police work as being more than simply for show, but continually makes deals with the club in order to avoid a greater evil. The two are another version of “childhood friends that grow up to find each other on opposite sides of the law,” but “Sons” does a nice job of taking this stereotypical set-up and giving it its own twist.

The greatest twist for the casual viewer might be Katey Segal’s Gemma. For anyone (like me) that watched “Lost” and thought, “Holy crap, Peggy Bundy can actually act!”, well, “Sons” will blow your damn mind off. She’s horrifying awesome in Season 1, a force of nature that stands as the one person you straight up do not cross. In Season 2, her character takes a more shocking turn, one that sets everything in motion while demonstrating the type of threat posed to her makeshift family of bikers. If you wondered if the “Katey Sagal was robbed!” talk was justified when she was snubbed for an Emmy nomination, well, consider it so. It’s so justified, Timothy Olyphant should be involved.

Aside from the show’s primary antiheroes, a plethora of secondary characters also steal the show on a weekly basis. While Kim Coates’ Sargent-at-Arms Tig got a lot of the showiest stuff, I kept getting drawn into Ryan Hurst’s Opie, Jax’s best friend and recipient of one of the show’s cruelest blows. Watching him spiral out of control, and desperately, misguidingly trying to pull himself out of it was television at its most heartbreaking, and yielded one of my favorite moments of this or any other season as he finally puts one chapter of his life to bed and starts another, incomplete but ready to once again be whole.

Mark Boone Junior’s Bobby Munson, along with William Lucking’s Piney Winston, both serve as initially comic characters that deepen as the show’s stakes get higher. Both function as examples of just how much SAMCRO means to members’ lives: watching the club rip itself apart scares the living shit out of these men, who are unable to think of a life without the club at its center. Maggie Siff also deserves huge kudos: her time on “Mad Men” didn’t prepare me for her layered work here, both in her relationship to Jax and her wonderfully nuanced relationship with Gemma. In a show strong on testerone, it’s these ladies that form not only the club’s heartbeat but in many ways its spine as well.

I’ve striven to be as vague as possible on the particulars of this story, since I am glad I went into the show knowing nothing more than, “This is a show people I trust say I should watch.” And after having devoured the show’s 26 episodes, I still trust ‘em good and plenty, as much as one SAMCRO member should trust another. While my writing schedule is heavy this Fall, I’ll be writing about Season 3 of “Sons” (premiering on FX September  7th, 10 pm EST) as often as possible. In a television landscape that too often plays it safe (both in terms of plot and character), “Sons” stands out for taking everything sacred and making it hurt, both for its characters and for its audience. But holy hell, it hurts so good.

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