The FX drama series Sons of Anarchy plays to an increasingly common formula, but does it well.

The FX TV network made its name by offering "edgy" series emulating the outre and sensationalistic subject matter of pay-TV networks HBO and Showtime, stretching the boundaries of free-TV programming with shows such as Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Damages. The shows have earned both good ratings and critical plaudits. (AMC has followed suit with critically acclaimed shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad.)

Of course, these supposedly cutting edge programs involve a formula of their own. Typically, the story centers on a clearly flawed and morally compromised but basically decent person drawn into dire and increasingly fanciful and unpleasant situations in a setting recognizable but not overly familiar to viewers. (This even happens in the comedies.)

In Damages, for example, an extremely ambitious young lawyer lands her dream job—and falls in the center of a web of intrigue, betrayal, huge money, and multiple murder. In Mad Men a successful early 1960s advertising executive is pursued by events from his unsavory past. And so on.

The new FX series Sons of Anarchy fits the formula well. The thirtyish, ruggedly handsome but smart and secretly sensitive protagonist, Jackson ("Jax") Teller, is the only son of the founder of a California biker gang known as the Sons of Anarchy. Respected as the founder’s son and widely liked by the gang’s terrifyingly disturbed and immoral but amusingly colorful members, Jax is the heir apparent should its cagey and brutal current leader, Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman, the two Hellboy films, Beauty and the Beast), ever have to be replaced.

Jax, however, is developing doubts about the wisdom, and indeed the morality, of the gang’s increasingly violent criminal activities. Originally envisioned by Jax’s father as a harmless, idealistic, hippie-style commune, the gang quickly evolved after the latter’s death many years ago into a vast criminal enterprise centering on the supply of illegal drugs and guns. The apple apparently has not fallen far from the tree, however, as Jax, finding some documents outlining his father’s original vision for the group, immediately sees them as likely to lead to a much better life than the one into which he was born.

Complicating the situation is the fact that Jax’s mother, Gemma (Katey Sagal), married Clay, her husband’s partner, after her idealistic husband’s death, and has been fully complicit and in fact pitotal in turning the group into a criminal operation. Jax is unaware that his mum is a superior manipulator and indeed a murderess who in fact shares with Clay full responsibility for turning the gang into a criminal enterprise. What Jax doesn’t see, then, but which is obvious to the audience, is that Gemma will never let him jeopardize the operation.

There are, as it happens, powerful outside forces eager to do so. As the premiere episode begins, the gang is quickly thrown into a war with a rival gang, the Mayans, that stole guns belonging to the Sons of Anarchy. In the course of retrieving the guns, Clay, aware of Jax’s highly unpleasant developing moral scruples, goads the would-be scion to shoot a wounded and defenseless Mayan, posing it as a loyalty and leadership test. In the midst of all of this, Jax’s meth-addicted girlfriend, Wendy, has prematurely given birth to a baby boy, Abel, who has a couple of potentially fatal birth defects.

Jax nobly bears all these burdens in just the first episode, and things promise to become even more complicated and disturbing as Deputy Police Chief David Hale pursues the gang in a one-man effort to clean up the town, which the producers have named Charming in a truly spectacular display of obvious irony and ironic obviousness.

Naturally, the success of the program will depend on viewers liking Charlie Hunnam’s portrayal of Jax and believing the character to be plausible and his motives both identifiable and ultimately honorable. That’s how the formula works, however, and the fact that the producers have thus far been as manipulative as Gemma suggests they’ll be able to bring it off.

And success in showing Charlie’s courageous attempts to rise above the immorality he has always been taught could make for some edifying drama.