When You Recognize The Quality But Don't Watch It: 'Sons Of Anarchy' vs. 'NCIS'

Charlie Hunnam of Sons Of Anarchy and Pauley Perrette of NCIS both play characters with tattoos, but they're very different tattoos on very different shows. (Prashant Gupta/FX (left) / Cliff Lipson/CBS (right))

by Sara Sarasohn

I like to think of myself as a person who knows and likes quality TV. I love The Wire and Arrested Development and Mad Men. But every Tuesday evening when I get to my DVR, I pick the gently brain-numbing over the Quality TV. I watch NCIS and not Sons of Anarchy. (I live in California, so the 10pm shows on the cable channels show up at 7 p.m. for me, setting the two shows against each other.)

Why Sons of Anarchy is great - but not what I want to watch on Tuesdays, after the jump.

The drama in Sons of Anarchy is built around a long-established biker gang in central California. Its internal alliances shift and clash during wild parties, fistfights and club meetings that run on something like Robert's Rules of Order. Katey Sagal plays the wife of the current club leader (Ron Perlman) and the mother of young member (Charlie Hunnam) who is challenging that leader for dominance. She subtly influences their schemes and power plays with the skill of a Carmela Soprano or a Joan Holloway. I think it's the most complex group dynamic on television right now.

This season, the Sons of Anarchy are being challenged by white supremacists. The Sons have been equal-opportunity gun runners, selling to the Mexican and black gangs, and the supremacists want that to stop. Henry Rollins was made to play a white supremacist thug, and I love the way he works with Adam Arkin, the standup-businessman supremacist. The tension between them, thug versus white collar within the world of white supremacists, is a lovely nuance. The layers of conflict between the Sons and the supremacists are manifested in tactics including opening a high-end cigar shop, setting up a meth lab, kidnapping and rape.

The rape is part of the reason I watched NCIS last night and not Sons of Anarchy. The rape was totally integral to the plot, and its effects have played out over many episodes. I love the way it's been written. But at 8:30 on a Tuesday after I've spent a long day working at the office and I'm at home with my family, I don't want to take in the realistic, subtle and intense ramifications of a rape. I just want to let my mind go blank with something comfortable: NCIS.

There's nothing subtle about the NCIS investigators' team banter. All the characters are types: the stoic leader, the cut-up second-in-command, the tattooed tech. In a funny parallel to Sons of Anarchy's rape, there's an ongoing plot thread about a team member (Cote de Pablo) who was kidnapped and tortured at the beginning of the season. But the way the show treats it is very different: she's over it now, cleared for duty just a few episodes in, and back investigating murders.

Even the treatment of tattoos is telling: I'm vaguely amused by Pauley Perrette's tattoos on NCIS, which are just quick shorthand to tell the audience she's quirky. But I am fascinated by Charlie Hunnam's tattoo of his baby son's name in Sons of Anarchy, which is huge and elaborate and must have taken hours of work to complete. He doesn't spend much time with his baby onscreen, though, and I feel certain that the contrast between his actual time fathering and the time investment in that tattoo are deliberate choices made by the writers of the series.

Still, this morning, Sons of Anarchy is unwatched on my DVR, but I know who committed the murder on NCIS. Its jokey familiarity was just what I needed last night. The purpose of television is entertainment, and in that, NCIS is more successful than Sons of Anarchy.