• Sons of Anarchy, 10-11 p.m. Wednesday, FX

The Sons of Anarchy is not your grandfather's motorcycle gang. It includes vegetarians, computer hackers and even a guy wearing an oxygen mask. A newbie ordered to dig up a corpse for use in some nefarious scheme earnestly warns the rest of the gang: ``This is really bad karma.''

On the other hand, some things haven't changed. There are five murders, a pool-room castration and the savage beating of an Elvis impersonator in the first hour of Sons of Anarchy. Yet the queen of the gang worries that it's getting soft. ''Remorse is a dangerous thing,'' she frets. So are pool cues, at least in this show.

Anybody worried (or, in the case of perpetual foes like the Parents Television Council, maybe hopeful) that the impending demise of the venerable renegade-cop drama The Shield would cause the cable net FX to be any less violent, fearless or entertaining, can heave a sigh of relief (or resignation) with the debut of Sons of Anarchy. The unlikeliness of its programming premise -- that a vicious, sociopathic band of gun-runners and narcotraffickers can be entertaining on a weekly basis -- is exceeded only by the skill of its execution. Sons of Anarchy is bloody, disturbing and maniacally addictive.

Motorcycle gangs have a long and lurid history in American popular entertainment, stretching back to the moment when Marlon Brando's band of leather-boy punks roared into that little town in The Wild One more than five decades ago, and FX's new drama certainly taps into it. Sex is casual (''You can buy those by the case, be a lot cheaper,'' a convenience-store clerk advises a gang member buying a box of condoms); violence sudden, savage and senseless.

But just as The Sopranos sliced and diced the DNA of a thousand gangster pictures to create an approach that was at once both novel and familiar, Sons of Anarchy tips the genre on its head. For every scene of a hijacking or robbery, there's one of a gang member worrying about mortgage payments or trying to placate an angry wife.

The contradictions between lawlessness and domesticity, in fact, are at the heart of Sons of Anarchy. Significantly, it's a not a show about the open road, but rather a portrait of what might have happened if Brando's gang had settled down in the little town it invaded.

The Sons not only inhabit but control the tiny, ironically named town of Charming, Calif. The local sheriff and police chief are both in their pockets and their auto-repair shop provides a legal front for their real business, running guns across the border with Mexico.

There are clouds on the horizon, though. A rival gang is cutting into the arms business (and leveraging its takeover by means considerably more lethal than stock proxies) and drug dealers are violating the Sons' rule that meth is fine for other towns but not theirs. And the Sons are suffering the inevitable upheavals that accompany leadership changes as an older generation of bosses gives way to the next.

The heir-apparent is Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam, Queer As Folk), the son of the gang's now-deceased founder. Jax, already unsettled at becoming a father for the first time, is taken aback by his discovery of a history of the Sons written by his father. Far from glorifying the gang's mayhem, the manuscript is pockmarked with regrets. ''We were going to change the world,'' his father wrote, but ``when you move your life off the social grid, you give up the safety that society provides. On the fringe, blood and bullets are the rule of law.''

But his tentative efforts to create a kinder, gentler Sons go nowhere. When a rival gang blows up their arms warehouse, Jax's suggestion that they get out of the gun-running business is greeted with mute incomprehension by the rest of the group. ''What do you mean?'' asks one, his brow furrowed in bafflement at the very concept of a straight life.

The stiffest resistance of all comes from Jax's own mom Gemma, a tawdry, tattooed Lady Macbeth played with chilling intensity by Katey Sagal. Reminding Jax that his father was killed on a Sons mission, dragged 200 yards by a runaway truck, she declares: ''Tellers do not die easy.'' But she's got no rejoinder to his prophetic reply: ''No, we just die bloody.'' Those killing fields make compulsive viewing in Sons of Anarchy.

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