'Sons of Anarchy' Catch-Up Guide

Excellent - i'm one of those who is going to start watching or at least dvring the new season. not sure if i'll be able to get it all without going back to watch the first two seasons but with this seed it may be possible.

thanks for the seed, good sir.

The New york times has a piece i just seeded - you can read it directly here - on the show.

“We are separatists, not supremacists,” the sedately spoken businessman says. “We are God-fearing patriots. And in a time when black radicals are in power in this country, we are desperately trying to remind our citizens of their founding beliefs.”

Those words belong not to a fringe politico at a Glenn Beck rally but to a fictitious professional racist, ably played by Adam Arkin, during the second season of “Sons of Anarchy,” the producer Kurt Sutter’s depiction of outlaw biker life in a Northern California beleaguered by ethnic factionalism and a pervasive air of peril. The drama, which starts its third season on Tuesday at 10 p.m. on FX, is thematically indebted to the western, but topically it sits with us as a distant and infinitely more sophisticated relation of Paul Haggis’s 2005 film, “Crash,” which imagined Los Angeles as a place animated exclusively by conflicting prejudices.

Here the prejudices are more compellingly formalized into gang rivalries. Despite its resonance and robust ratings, “Sons of Anarchy” hasn’t had the feel of cultural obligation. It would be possible to travel from cookouts to cocktail parties up and down the Northeast corridor and never be asked to deliver an opinion on whether the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club, beset by its internal Shakespearean tensions, ought to dig deeper into its feral, vigilante heart or go straight. And yet more than any other series on television, it has presciently captured the ugly nativist strain running on the edges of American life, the mentality that has led to false beliefs about the president’s birth status and talk of denaturalizing “anchor babies.”