TV Watch: Sons of Anarchy

The best gang show on television this side of 'The Sopranos' has just concluded it's 2nd full season, and fans of this emerging masterpiece will be happy to learn that 'Sons of Anarchy' has just been renewed for a full third season that will begin airing in September 2010.

For the uninitiated, the show centers on the activities of a biker gang, also known as an outlaw motorcycle club (MC) called the 'Sons of Anarchy' which alternately is known by the nickname 'Samcro' or 'Sam Crow', a moniker loosely based on an anacronym for the official full name of the 'Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Original' charter.

The show airs on the 'FX' network with in-season first run episodes coming on Tuesday nights at 10pm. Prior episodes are available through the Comcast OnDemand service in the TV Entertainment section.

'Sons' centers largely around both the MC and family activities of three main characters. Charlie Hannum is a revelation as Jackson 'Jax' Teller, a young Vice-President of the MC and the son of deceased club founder John Teller. Katey Sagal plays Jax' mother, Gemma Teller Morrow, the matriarch of the family and the MC. Widow of the founder, she is now married to the new President of the MC. That character is Clarence 'Clay' Morrow, played by veteran actor Ron Perlman.

The 'Sons' run an automotive repair business as a cover front for their real business, a lucrative gun-running operation. They are in complete control of the small town of Charming, California in which they reside and base their operations. While somewhat of a menace to law enforcement in the town, the MC does try to keep the town clean of drugs and other illegal crime operations.

The prime conflict developing in the show is that during the first season, Jax stumbles across a sort of manifesto that his late father wrote just before his death. In it, John had been planning to take the club 'clean', getting it out of all illegal activities. Jax begins to see this as a birthright, as his destiny.

His mother Gemma is aware of the manifesto, but is against that direction knowing that her current husband Clay has no intention of changing course. Much of the internal family activity revolves around Gemma running interference and playing mediator between these two most important men in her life as they begin to butt heads more and more regarding the direction that the MC should take. Other interesting plot lines are developed around the main characters and the fine supporting cast.

That support is led by Maggie Siff as Jax' love interest Dr. Tara Knowles. A former love of Jax in the past, Tara returns to town and their relationship once again takes off after a major traumatic incident, causing strain on her career and both of their personal lives.

The other MC members include Mark Boone as club Secretary Bobby Munson, Kim Coates as the wild Sergeant-at-Arms Alex 'Tig' Trager, Tommy Flanagan as Scottish club member 'Chibs Telford, Theo Rossi as club Intel Officer Juan Carlos 'Juice' Ortiz, Ryan Hurst as 'Opie' Winston, William Lucking as Opie's dad and fellow club member 'Piney' Winston, and Johnny Lewis as Kip Epps, a young Iraq War veteran trying to join the club.

Their principle nemesis is a white separatist organization known as 'The League' that is trying to muscle in on Samcro's gun business, and that manipulates the local black and Hispanic gangs against one another and against Samcro. Veteran actor Adam Arkin plays that organization's clean cut evil leader, Ethan Zoebelle, and Henry Rollins plays his right-hand man and a true neo-Nazi in AJ Weston.

Law enforcement in Charming walks the line between wanting to shut down Samcro but realizing that it may be the lesser of two evils. That faction is played by Dayton Callie as Chief Wayne Unser, and by Taylor Sheridan as his Deputy Chief David Hale. From the Federal angle, Ally Walker plays ATF agent June Stahl, trying hard to shutdown Samcro and put the members behind bars.

The first two seasons have seen the development of the characters, with an interesting enough first season followed up by an even better written and more well acted second season that just ended. The first season ends with the death of a major character, something that 'The Sopranos' became well known for, and the second season finish only leaves fans thirsty for more next year.

At times, shows like 'Sons of Anarchy' slip through the cracks for many TV viewers who habitually only watch the 'major' networks such as ABC, NBC, CBS, HBO, and Showtime for their series. But 'FX' has both 'Sons' and their outstanding comedy "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' to offer (I'll cover them in my next 'TV Watch' installment), and AMC offers perhaps the best dramatic show on television in the previously reviewed 'Mad Men' series.

While it doesn't contain the 'R' rated language and sexual scenes of other cable shows, it remains edgy enough. And in the familial struggles and the struggles of Jax to possibly reform the MC, there is also a chance at redemption here. If you were a fan of 'The Sopranos' but haven't watched 'The Sons of Anarchy' as yet, give it a shot. Once you get to know the characters and follow the plot line after a handful of episodes, you will be hooked.

NOTE: This is a continuation of the 'TV Watch' series of television program reviews. To see all entries in the series, click on that below Label.

All That Junk

You know, we can't always write and talk about the big things like religion, politics and culture. Sometimes you just have to get something that is relatively small and insignificant out on to the table and off your chest. I was going through my mail today. Perhaps you see where this is going. Is it not incredible the amount of junk mail we receive at our homes? Junk mail alone probably keeps tens of thousands of U.S. Postal employees in their jobs. Unless there is something of obvious interest or importance, during the week I will let most of our mail pile up and then go through it on Saturday mornings. This morning's haul included items from the American Cancer Society, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Verizon, Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, and Comcast. These were just the mailings that you could tell from the outer envelope were from particular businesses or organizations. There were a number more that were important looking, but that had no identification on the outside letting me know where they were coming from. Of course by experience in opening them in the past, the odds were that most of these would be credit card or bank loan offers. Let's open them and take a look. Capital One loan offer, American Express gold card offer, BJ's member value program, Mealey's mattress 'overstock blitz' sale, and finally a notice that my property might be involved in some class action law suit involving PGW and mercury poisoning. Nice. And this is all before today's mail delivery has even arrived. The St. Jude's mailing involved address labels. We probably receive that kind of thing 3-4 times a year. All unsolicited, of course. So what are you supposed to do with them, toss them away? Perfectly good return address labels that someone made up with your infomation on them. As for me and mine, we are keeping the labels and using them. No one told you to make them up. We did not place an order for these items. There is no legal or even moral obligation for me to send you even a small donation in return. So thanks for the free return address labels that more likely than not will end up on my Christmas cards in December. There are any number of websites and organizations out there that will help you reduce the amount of junk mail that you receive, and they work. Just 'Google' the term 'junk mail' for their information and advice. I know that it is effective, because a few years back I followed some advice and sure enough found less in my mailbox. For awhile. What happens is that as time goes along, I found that I was back on mailing lists. Almost every time that you order anything at all, or become a member of any organization, your information is back out there in mailers files. Order books from Amazon or B.Dalton online, clothing or paraphernalia from the NFL or MLB, make a charitable donation to a large organization, take a poll, sign up for a website affiliation, subscribe to a newspaper or magazine, order flowers or other gifts. Any of these activities leave you open to having your information back out there again in the solicitors hands. And there goes your mailbox, bulging again from all the junk mail. Funny thing is, I can't remember ever actually ordering anything that came in to my home as junk mail. I don't recall ever taking out a loan, or obtaining a credit card, or ordering merchandise in this way. It makes me curious as to what the overall results are for those who do the mailings. Are the costs in sending these mass mailings out to our homes really recouped by sales or donations or applications? I honestly find that hard to believe. But if not, you would expect that this practice would have died out a long time ago. And with all this talk of junk mail, I am not even including the flyers that are hand-delivered for pizza parlors, chinese food joints, sandwich shops, real estate offices, and political campaigns. It all adds up to what seems to be a mountain of wasted paper and ink. In any event, despite the claims that some will make to you, there really is no way to ultimately kill the junk mail from coming to your home. Perhaps if you got yourself a 'P.O.' box address, that would alleviate some, if you instruct the post office to deliver all of your mail there. Before ending this little rant against junk mail, an important security reminder. Much of this stuff has your personal, private information. Your name and address are included on most of it, and sometimes even more private information is included on the items. If you don't already do it as a practice, you need to begin to make 'shredding' a part of your regular routine. Any junk mail that comes into your home should be shredded. You can either shred the entire envelope and contents, or open the mail, discard the envelopes and any inserts into the trash, and then shred the applications or other items that actually show your information. Making this a regular habit will greatly reduce your risk of having your identity stolen and misused. If you are someone who saves pay stubs, financial statements, and medical records, make sure that you establish a regular pattern of shredding these items as well, perhaps once a year, or every 3-5 years or so. I thought that it might be an interesting project to get a box and just toss all the junk mail for a year into it, and then at the end of the year get that box weighed. Multiply the weight of all that junk by all the homes in the country, and the shear volume of waste would have to be staggering. But then I found out that folks have already done this. Some have even turned their voluminous junk mail piles into artistic sculptures. Talk about too much time on your hands. Oh well, here comes the mailman...

None of Our Business

A leading business website, Inc.com, billed as 'The Daily Resource for Entrepreneurs', has released its annual list of 'The Best Cities for Doing Business'. Where do you think that Philadelphia ranked on their list of 393 metropolitan areas? A top-ten city by population, you would think that Philly would probably be there somewhere among the leaders, right? Well, before we get too excited, let's examine some of the criteria that the e-zine factors in order to formulate the rankings. What 'Inc.com' does as an overall approach is that they analyze job-growth data as supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the previous calendar year on 393 metropolitan statistical areas across the country. The list just released was specifically derived from analysis of three-month rolling averages of the BLS state and area unadjusted employment data from January 1995 to September 2006, and uses four measures of growth to rank all areas for which data was available for the past ten years. These four measures are: recent growth trend, analyzing this and last year; midterm growth, averaging 2001-06 rates; long-term trend, analyzing 1995-2006 data; and current year growth. This data includes non-farm employment, manufacturing, financial services, business and professional services, educational and health services, information, retail and wholesale trade, transportation and utilities, leisure and hospitality, and government. While any time you attempt to put together a ranking across a broad spectrum of categories you are going to get subjectivity in the analysis of those categories, the fact is that this is not a study and listing that is done haphazardly and frivolously. It is a serious look at relevant statistics in order to determine areas that are growing, and that ultimate also exposes areas that are stagnating. On the surface, Philly would seem to have much going for it, and it does. We have major employers headquartered here, places like Comcast. We have an excellent mass-transit system including Septa, Amtrak, and Patco. We have first-class entertainment facilities such as the Avenue of the Arts, varied quality sports facilities like The Linc and Citizens Bank Park and the Palestra, a world-class Art Museum, a top-notch zoo, etc. Easy transportation access through I-95 by land, the Delaware River by sea, and Philadelphia International Airport by air among others. And we have people, lots of people, and a variety of them by racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual and any other orientation that you can describe. There is much to like about the Philadelphia area, politics aside, and you do have to set aside politics. which has been a mess for a long time here in Philly. There is much to like about Philly, tax-status aside, and you do have to set aside our taxation system. Here in Philly, our tax policies are typically liberal for a large city, and liberal Democratic Party taxation means that we tax unfairly, more than other cities, and on things that other cities do not. In recent decades, our tax policies have led to the loss of 250,000 jobs and the loss of a half-million residents. Other cities are growing, but Philly is in decline, and we continue to lose jobs and residents every single year. 'Philadelphia Forward', an organization put together in an attempt to reform Philly's tax policies, reports that "the typical city residents tax burden is 50% higher than the tax burden for a suburban resident at a similar income level." In other words, living here in the city kills your take-home pay, and it does the same to business profits. Most cities do not tax your wages, but we do, and we do it at a rate of 3.98%, the highest in the nation. Philly taxes business at the highest rate of all major American cities, and its real estate tax assessment system can be described as unfair and antiquated at best. In short, we have all the pretty things and look nice on the outside, but we are decaying on the inside. When most people look to move their families into an area, or evaluate where their families will continue to live as they grow, and when business looks to move into or remain in an area long term, they look closely not only at the surface features, but also look under the hood. When you look under the hood at the engine that drives Philadelphia, you find an entrenched liberal Democratic government that taxes and spends more than almost any other entity in the United States. No wonder then when I scan down the list of metro areas in the Inc.com rankings looking for Philadelphia and cannot find us among the top ten, where our population ranking sits. Nope, not even in the top twenty, or the top one hundred. Wow, scanning down, scanning down. Ah, found us. There we are, ranked out of 393 metro areas at number......351! Ouch. Well, at least its better than last year when we were ranked at number 392. Yikes! The bottom line is that there is really no reason to live inside the City of Philadelphia unless you have to, which is one major reason that the city clings to its antiquated policy of forcing city employees to live inside the city limits. If Philly updated its policy and allowed city employees to live wherever in the region they wanted, I can guarantee you that it would lose thousands of more residents in the ensuing half-decade. The bottom line that is revealed by the Inc.com ranking and the Philadelphia Forward assessments is that Philadelphia is a big city in big trouble, and showing no signs of changing its ways. We will continue to look pretty on the outside, but only because our politicians will continue to tax heavily to maintain that pretty look. Meanwhile, Philadelphia will continue to die slowly on the inside, further deteriorating that tax base of businesses and residents, and thus raising the tax burden continually on those who choose to. or are forced to, stay behind. Business will continue to mostly flee the city, as chemical giant Rohm & Haas is about to do. What can change this status? I have been saying it for a long time. Philadelphia needs a real, viable, political alternative. A healthy Republican Party that espouses lower taxes, less spending, a more business-friendly environment, and more conservative solutions to social problems such as crime and education. Unfortunately, that shows no signs of happening anytime soon, or even within the rest of my lifetime. As always, the title of this entry is a link to more information, in this case to the article and rankings in question.