FX's "Sons of Anarchy" is another series about antiheroes, in this case a northern California motorcycle gang and criminal enterprise. Unsurprisingly, the show erupts from a man named Kurt Sutter, a longtime scriptwriter of the gruesome FX crooked-cop series "The Shield." Sutter admitted -- boasted, really -- to the Miami Herald that he's trouble: "My sensibility is really twisted and dark ... Every story pitch that ever got me thrown out of a meeting, I put in 'The Shield.'" Sutter was the source of two of the most notorious scenes in that show, the melting of a drug dealer's face into an electric grill burner, and a police captain being forced to commit an act of oral sex on a gang member at gunpoint, with all its revolting head-bobbing.
Sutter told the Herald's Glenn Garvin that FX executives patiently ask him to consider that not yet everyone shares his "vision," and so he has to move a little slower. "The notes weren't saying, 'don't do it,' but 'we want to honor your vision; now how are we going to photograph it?'" he recounted. "I lose perspective of people's capacity for watching violence. I just do. . . . I really need somebody to say, 'You can't do that. You don't want to turn people off.'"
In a nutshell, what we're hearing is FX executives who have a lot more sensitivity to the "vision" of a seriously twisted human being than they do to the prospect of a 10-year-old boy finding a terrifying castration scene as he's flipping channels in his home.
As usual, the TV critics are almost as sick as the alleged visionaries of Tinseltown. Associated Press critic Frazier Moore oozed about "Sons" that "FX is adding to its roster of outstanding dramas that showcase fascinating anti-heroes who buck the system, doing some good but leaving plenty of collateral damage. They are shrewd go-getters who, more than anything, keep creating problems for themselves."
Moore doesn't mention the castration scene, but he seems to suggest that it's just another example of "shrewd go-getters" bucking the system.
Once again, the gruesome unfolding of a pervert's mind onto a national television screen underlines the need for the cable industry to provide a system of consumer choice, where parents have some ability to pick and pay for the cable networks they want, and not subsidize the twisted Wizards of Id at networks like FX.