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Bikers and barristers

The new TV season doesn't begin for three weeks. But a number of shows are diving in early, intent on getting a few laps in before the big boys cannonball into the pool. Today we look at a pair of new cable series that are jumping the networks.

British actor Charlie Hunnam is a find as the violent yet sensitive Jax in "Sons of Anarchy," about a Calif. motorcycle gang.
British actor Charlie Hunnam is a find as the violent yet sensitive Jax in "Sons of Anarchy," about a Calif. motorcycle gang.Read moreRAY MICKSHAW / FX

The new TV season doesn't begin for three weeks. But a number of shows are diving in early, intent on getting a few laps in before the big boys cannonball into the pool. Today we look at a pair of new cable series that are jumping the networks.

The better bet is

Sons of Anarchy

on FX (Wednesdays at 10 p.m.), a shockingly good series about a motorcycle gang in the apocryphal California valley town of Charming.

This is the most unusual and engaging family drama since

The Sopranos

, to which

Sons of Anarchy

bears certain similarities. Both series concern themselves with macho male bonding, much of it in a clubhouse setting, with protagonists who are engaged in the darkest precincts of the black market.

These bikers are at constant war with rival motorcycle crews, white supremacists, and various other criminal enterprises. Plus they have a rather testy relationship with the cops and the ATF.

But Samcro (as they call themselves, for Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club: Redwood Original) isn't your typical biker clan. They don't deal meth (settling for guns instead) and they're Internet-savvy.

The challenge in mounting a rough-and-tumble series like this, in which half the production budget is spent on tattoos, is in the casting.

Ron Perlman (

Hellboy

) seems a little long in the tooth to be living the outlaw life. But as Clay, the club president, he snarls like a young lion. And Kim Coates is excellent as Samcro's hard-bitten sergeant-at-arms. Coates looks like a villain from Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies.

The real find here is British actor Charlie Hunnam (

Green Street Hooligans

), who looks like a tougher model of rock martyr Kurt Cobain. He's riveting in the role of Jax, the charismatic son of the club's founder.

His Jax is violent but sensitive, with an awkward sentimental streak that spills out from time to time. He's a sweetheart with a very hard shell. His conflicted hero and the occasional wicked streak of humor found in the scripts gives this leather-clad series an appealing heart.

Katy Sagal (

Married . . . With Children

) plays Jax's flinty mom, a woman with agendas of her own. Drea de Matteo (

The Sopranos

) plays - at least for a few episodes - Jax's junkie ex, the mother of his medically challenged newborn son. And Maggie Siff, who appeared on the first season of

Mad Men

as the Jewish department store owner, turns up here as a pediatric doctor with a soft spot for Jax.

Check out

Sons of Anarchy

and you'll probably develop one, too.

TNT's legal drama

Raising the Bar

(Mondays at 10 p.m.) presents life on both sides of the courtroom aisle. Meet Manhattan's district attorneys and the public defenders who oppose them. They fight like cats and dogs in the halls of justice all day and then discuss ethics and tactics over copious drinks in the bar at night.

It's a flamboyant package from prolific producer Steven Bochco (

NYPD Blue

,

L.A. Law

) with lots of dramatic flourishes, like the overweight assistant district attorney who keels over in the middle of his summation in the opening scene of the pilot.

There's lots of on-the-job sex, too, like the randy judge (Jane Kaczmarek) and her bisexual court clerk (Jonathan Scarfe). Then there's the public defender (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and the prosecutor (Melissa Sagemiller) who are bitter adversaries on the job but secret lovers at night. (Hey, just like Frank Furillo and Joyce Davenport from

Hill Street Blues

, Bochco's breakthrough show.) You also get the usual surprise twists at the end of trials, when the good guys snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, a TV plot staple since Perry Mason was practicing law.

Everyone on this show is ambitious and overworked. They're all trying to make the best of a legal system that is irretrievably broken, a bureaucracy that continually misses the forest for the thorny underbrush.

On

Raising the Bar

, urban criminal law is a blind and brutal assembly line covered with tears and blood. Yet the harried attorneys on this show find time to get involved in their clients' lives while bored judges do crossword puzzles on the bench.

For the first time in his career, Bochco seems to be going through the motions. All the characters appear to have emerged from the stockroom. Like the rich-kid public defender who flies in a witness from Central America on his dad's corporate jet when the office budget won't pay for it. Or the black prosecutor who is forced to wince and bear it while shielding a racist witness.

In tone, plot and setting,

Raising the Bar

resembles

100 Centre Street

and a half-dozen other Manhattan-based courtroom dramas of recent vintage. Even the choppy montages of New York street life that preface every scene seem like holdovers from

NYPD Blue.

The tent pole for this series is Gosselaar, a Bochco favorite, as defender Jerry Kellerman. With his long hair and his passion for the underdog, there's something positively messianic about this character as he slouches along in his rumpled gabardine suit with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

But spend some time with him and he seems too thin and not all that interesting. Sort of like the series he's charged with carrying.