I have a litany of issues with Sons of Anarchy, so much so, I don't think I could sit through a rewatch because of the ending. (See also: Dexter - I could reconsider based on the new series, but same time I'm not stoked enough to actually care about the new series that would justify rewatching). I'll never not feel bad for Jimmy Smits' character in Sons, that travesty lives in my brain rent free, I hate how Gemma ruined everything over her psychotic obsession with family, I hate how Jax went out. I hate Tara died right before she almost got out, she was my favourite character.
But what really got me was the amount of times Jax basically sabotages himself for the sake of the club. I get that's the premise, that there's no way out, but when you have a main character you've been trying to root for since the pilot, and they keep making choices that screw them over, how are you supposed to keep on their side?
And that's all I'm getting out of Peaky Blinders.
I knew there were exact analogies with this and Sons. Tommy is Jax, Polly is Gemma, Grace is Tara, Tig is Arthur, John is Juice. They have younger siblings to care for who are embroiled in the club and used for "errands" and who grow up with loyalty to the family, there are the wives and the girls they need to get certain shit done and help with making little grubby heirs to their empires.
But it's all heading south for Tommy and I'm a little over watching shows where the hero gets it all and pisses it all away. If the tension is prolonged over living on a knife's edge and every episode is another bullet dodged, it gets really tired. I was into Cillian Murphy's performance but the gravelly voice is grating on me, he's a good character that's compromised constantly by his gang and his family, and the law/IRA/opposing gangs like to use him as a pawn or constantly demand loyalty, Churchill keeping him alive more or less for "jobs". The little "adjustments" to history are here, whereas Sons was more loosely based on one actor's experiences to give the show realism, Blinders incorporates real life historical figures to kind of play with what if scenarios, which only ever worry me when it becomes a case of a viewer refusing to look up the facts (like they do with the Crown) and they start to take this version of events as reality. I think the writers of these shows have too much confidence in the audience's ability to discern fact from fiction. How many mates have you had who watched a show or movie based on real events and took it all as 100% gospel. Any retelling has to be taken with so many grains of salt. It's why I'm starting to feel very iffy about the "any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental" clause with fiction, when it's very hard for a writer not to imprint versions of other people and themselves onto certain characters. I know these shows have their own disclaimers if they are insisting upon retelling an historical event, but that's not enough to cover your butt. I think it is legally but it doesn't get removed from the public consciousness. Either people take it all as reality, or they go the other way and think the movie Titanic was just a movie and not based on an actual event. The span of time between the event and the retelling expands, I'm not saying every story written about historical events are completely accurate, if some rando wrote the Bible and tried to get it published, it would be rejected for narrative issues and continuity errors at least. Same time, I don't refute history isn't a goldmine for fictional stories based around certain facts/events. I'm not brilliant at using history in narratives, I'm superficial by being lazy about fact checking. You need a whole other person willing to fact check you because publishers don't.
My real point was the protagonists in both these shows tend to lose the lustre via their actions, that they want to hold on to all that is pure and good once it's within their grasp but the lifestyle they lived to get thus far inevitably drags them back in. Being a gambling man with your livelihood ain't cool, brah. I'm not really gonna get mushy feelings for a problematic hero who has a history of self-sabotage and unreasonable loyalty to their club/gang. You start to think, you put all your stock in people who only care about a nebulous concept based on "feelings" and not for your welfare.
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