'All About Steve': There's Something Odd About Mary

WGA's John Wells and John Bowman decide to hug it out

The two Johns have made peace.

John Bowman, who was chairman of the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America, West, last year, and union presidential candidate John Wells have ended an ugly feud.

In a letter to members last week, Bowman and outgoing President Patric Verrone had accused Wells of keeping the union leadership in the dark about his dealings with the Directors Guild of America and undermining their own negotiating efforts. Bowman and Verrone are backing Elias Davis, who is running against Wells in a tight contest.

But in a joint statement, made during a candidates forum Wednesday night, the men chalked up their dispute to an "honest misunderstanding between friends" and said they were eager to move on for the sake of fostering unity in the guild.

Bowman acknowledged that "of course we knew that John was talking to the DGA" but that the men had an "honest misunderstanding" over what the scope of his talks would be. "But he is still my friend, I still like and respect him,'' Bowman said.

For his part, Wells said he had nothing but "friendship and respect" for Bowman and Verrone, adding that "we've all been through too much together to let one misunderstanding get in the way of that."

So how come the two candidates, who were jabbing at each other just a few days ago, now are going all lovey-dovey? Well, according to people close to the matter, Bowman and Wells realized the dispute was an unseemly display of disunity that was hurting the guild's image -- and threatened to become a distracting sideshow in the election. 

-- Richard Verrier

Photo: Left: Bowman (Spencer Weiner, Los Angeles Times); right; Wells (Getty Images).

'Sons of Anarchy' revs up the pace in its compelling new season

One of the great pleasures of this job is seeing a show evolve in the right direction.

"Sons of Anarchy" (9 p.m. Central Tuesday, FX; three and a half stars), a drama about a motorcycle club in northern California, spun its wheels a fair amount in its uneven first season. It was not at all clear that its rather callow lead character, up-and-coming biker Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam), could carry this drama, which echoes everything from "Deadwood" to "Hamlet."

But in Season 2, "Sons" has stepped on the gas and gone from middling to engrossing. The pacing is better, the plotting is tighter and the supporting cast is full of gems. But fair warning: Seeing the way white supremacist A.J. Weston (Henry Rollins) glares at people with his scarily intense black eyes may scar your soul a little.

FX can go dark with its dramas, but there is a limit: The network is not about to give us a drama in which the white supremacists are the good guys. The Sons have their rough side -- they sell guns to gang members and an IRA splinter group -- but they keep the peace, in their own fashion, in the small town of Charming. And they find the white supremacists who arrive repugnant for any number of reasons.

Adam Arkin brilliantly underplays the role of businessman Ethan Zobelle, who comes to Charming not just to open a cigar shop but to promulgate his white-power agenda and shut down the Sons' gun sales to "color." Zobelle and his musclebound associates are ruthless, and keeping the peace in Charming proves far more difficult than Jax and club president Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman) first thought.

Even without Zobelle and the fascinatingly creepy Weston stirring up trouble, the Sons have plenty of problems. Jax and Clay are at the heart of the escalating conflicts -- some old, some new -- that are threatening to tear apart the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club (and by the way, if you hear characters mentioning Sam Crow, it refers to an acronym for an alternate version of the club's name).

Morrow is either a dinosaur on the way out or the rock-solid leader the club needs in treacherous times. It's to the show's credit that both descriptions have a certain amount of validity, and I found myself alternately applauding Jax's newfound boldness and regretting his youthful heedlessness.

At least now Jax is on his way to being as important as Clay and his wife Gemma (Katey Sagal), who own not just Charming but the show. The sheer charisma and presence of Sagal and Perlman was the main reason to watch "Sons" in Season 1, and both actors are given excellent story lines this year. Sagal in particular has her work cut out for her, but both she and Maggie Siff (who plays Jax's girlfriend, Tara Knowles) are more than able to convey the strength, the sensuality and the vulnerability of these women. 

Jax fuels his secret idealism by reading the unpublished memoir of his father, John, who came back from Vietnam and co-founded what he hoped would be an alternate community free of society's constraints. The Sons morphed into something far different than what John had intended and his writings are full of impassioned regrets.

You had to get past a lot of swearing to see what "Deadwood" was about, which explored how a society creates itself (and that swearing, by the way, was poetry in the hands of David Milch). "Sons of Anarchy" may not match the heights that "Deadwood" reached -- for one thing, Charming is a far from fully realized place and its "civilians" are rarely heard from.

But "Sons" has, as "Deadwood" had, a barrier of sorts: In the case of the FX show, it's the violence, guns and porn that saturate the Sons' world. That may be a problem for some viewers, but they should know that those elements are balanced to a degree by the show's devious sense of humor.

At its heart, "Sons" is asking a pretty big question (one that recalls "The Shield," which "Sons" creator Kurt Sutter used to write for): How can you make your world better when you're hip deep in bad choices?

It's not quite clear what Jax wants for the Sons; he's not necessarily a big-picture guy. (If Jax succeeds in pushing out Clay, would the Sons be nicer gun dealers?) But Jax has his own baby son to raise, and though he never says so out loud, Jax doesn't want little Abel to have the narrow set of options that John inadvertently created for his family. 

In the fourth episode of the season, the bikers go out on a ride. And for the first time, I could see the appeal of that life. The Sons are, essentially, grown-up pirates. Riding along the dusty highways of northern California, they look like free men in search of trouble and adventure.

"The road helps," says Opie Winston (the quietly wonderful Ryan Hurst). "It might be why I signed up for all this [expletive] in the first place."

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