Hey!  Got a new TV series in mind?  Looking for an actor to play the quintessentially American male lead?  No problem.  Hire an Englishman.  Several of the hottest series on TV have done the same.  Let’s continue this exploration with a very popular current series.

Sons of Anarchy.  The lead character, played by Newcastle-born Charlie Hunnam: Jackson “Jax” Teller, son of the late John Thomas “JT” Teller, founding member and former President of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, based in the ironically-named town of Charming, in northern California.

Jax is a rising star in the MC, having achieved the post of Vice-President at a relatively young age, under the leadership of another founding member, Clay Morrow, played by veteran actor Ron Perlman.  Jax’s mother Gemma, played by Katey Sagal, is the Club’s matriarch and Clay’s “old lady”.

Jax is in turmoil.  He’s been reading his father JT’s journals and has discovered how disturbed his father was about the dangerous direction he believed the Club was taking.  Even as JT struggled to change that direction, he seemed to know that he wouldn’t live to see his goals achieved.  This resonates with Jax and so he takes up his father’s burden, trying to do what JT couldn’t.  This leads to an inevitable power struggle with Clay and his allies, as Jax negotiates the world of corrupt local cops and city officials, federal agents, rival clubs, white supremacists, Irish gun runners, and Colombian drug cartels.  It’s one step forward and two steps back, as every move Jax tries to make towards safer waters only leads the Club deeper into a morass.  It is reminiscent of Michael Corleone in the Godfather: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”  Jax is presented as the hero of this story, but the audience is never allowed to forget that he is capable of extreme violence, and demonstrates that regularly.  He has earned that patch “Men of Mayhem”.

Charlie Hunnam gained fame as a character in the TV series Queer as Folk and followed that up with strong roles in several movies including the Oscar-winning Cold Mountain.  His latest Hollywood effort was in the sci-fi action/adventure Pacific Rim.  He had been tapped to play the role of Christian Grey in the adaptation of the best-selling book 50 Shades of Grey, but has since dropped out.

Hey!  Got a new TV series in mind?  Looking for an actor to play the quintessentially American male lead?  No problem.  Hire an Englishman.  Several of the hottest series on TV have done the same.  Don’t believe me?  Then let’s start by reaching into the recent TV past.

House, MD., played by Oxford-born actor Hugh Laurie.  The lead and title character : Dr. Gregory House, Head of Diagnostic Medicine at Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital in New Jersey, and probably one of the most infuriating characters ever on TV.

House is a diagnostician nonpareil.  He is brilliant, passionate, charismatic, dogged, determined, a gifted musician, but has a serious character flaw: he hates people, and doesn’t like to talk to, or even go near patients.  He is cynical, volatile, selfish, manipulative and cruel.  His humor is juvenile, he publicly mocks and humiliates his employees and his boss, and he constantly takes advantage of the one person he considers a friend.  He suffers muscle wastage in one thigh that has left him lame and in constant pain, and blames the world for his condition.  He takes Vicodin for the pain and has become addicted to it.

Yet, despite all his bad behavior, and believe me, it is legion, all the other characters stand up for him, apologize for him, cover for him, and the audience always roots for him.

The actor Hugh Laurie is himself an athlete and a gifted piano player (yes, that’s him actually playing in the show).   He is best known in Britain for his comic roles as the dimwitted noble Prince George, Prince Regent in the Blackadder series opposite the brilliant Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame.  You might also remember him in the part of the equally dimwitted aristocrat, Bertie Wooster, in the hilarious Jeeves & Wooster opposite Stephen Fry as Jeeves, his long-suffering personal valet, protector, and straight man.  The popular TV series was based on the Jeeves stories by British author P.G. Wodehouse.

When Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, chooses a topic to write about, he doesn’t think small.  In this case, nothing less than the command and control structure and safety of America’s nuclear arsenal.  Framed by the detailed account of the explosion of a Titan 2 nuclear-warhead-tipped missile in its silo in rural Arkansas in 1980, Schlosser gives a detailed overview of the development of America’s nuclear arsenal, the efforts to keep it safe from accidental detonation, and the military’s, chiefly the Air Force’s, attempts to resist those efforts.  Their perverse reasoning was that any measures designed to prevent accidental detonation would hamper the weapons’ effectiveness if they ever actually were used.
The author’s point I believe was to demonstrate that nothing is ever 100% safe because it is technology designed and operated by humans, who are, by our very nature, fallible.  Yet it is a strangely reassuring book, because of all the accidents discovered by the author in the writing of this book, all the ways things could go wrong (poor design, espionage, dangerous handling, inadequate safety procedures, drug use by weapons handling and maintenance crews, and possible mental breakdown of key individuals), none has ever resulted in the detonation of a nuclear weapon, … so far.

Available at VPL in print and audiobook form.