agingrebel.com
A month before it appears on cable FX’s new biker shoot ‘em up, Mayans MC already looks like a hit.
A hit is a show that can sell a lot of commercials and charge a lot of money for allowing them to appear in the show.
The weekly trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable
announced today, in case you hadn’t already noticed, that Mayans MC was
the fifth most successfully promoted show for the fall. The research is
intended to be read by both production executives and ad buyers. The
data was collected by an enterprise called iSpot.tv. Most of it is
statistically arcane. At the risk of oversimplification, the research
calculated several categories of data including “impressions,”
“attention” and the value to the network of each show’s promotional ads.
“Impressions” is a measure of how many times a promo for a show has
been seen and “attention” measures how many times viewers have watched
the promo all the way through.
Number Five Right Now
Overall, Mayans MC came in
fifth. It probably would have been higher but its ad campaign is just
getting started. In this statistical race it finished behind 90 Day Fiancé on TLC; The Sinner on USA; The Great Food Truck Race on the Food Network; and Yellowstone Live on National Geographic. According to Broadcasting & Cable, 160,026,315 viewers have watched promos for Mayans MC,
about 92 percent of them paid attention and the value of the airtime to
show those commercials, virtually all of it on FX, was $1,529,001.
These numbers are intended to reassure ad buyers and corporate suits that Mayans MC will be a hit. Producer Kurt Sutter’s previous biker drama, Sons of Anarchy,
was a hit. Working against the show is Harley-Davidson’s recent
conclusion that far fewer people are interested in playing outlaw biker
now than a decade ago. Much of Sons of Anarchy’s initial success was built on Sutter’s insistence than that show was more truth than fantasy.
Just A Motorcycle Club
Mayans MC’s truth seems to be that the
members of this predominantly Chicano club in Southern California is an
organized crime cartel masquerading as a rough and tumble group of
public-spirited motorcycle enthusiasts. In the show’s most recent promo,
below, a jackass in a bar remarks to a Mayans prospect “That’s a fancy
vest you got there. That your badass gang?”
The prospect pauses while the audience
gets a look at what goes through his head. The audience sees many quick
scenes of Mayans being an astoundingly badass gang. Finally, the
prospect humbly and ironically replies, “Just a motorcycle club man.” No
doubt, that promo is meant to make its future audience tingle.
Of course the Mayans will be the most violent pack of beasts ever.
Which raises the question of how far out on a limb are Kurt Sutter and FX going to hang the Mongols Motorcycle Club. Sutter’s biker operas are intended to be seen by the general public as romans à clef
– true stories with thinly disguised real characters. At least for the
first three or four years, until it became a chick show, and when it
wasn’t being described as a brilliant reimagining of Hamlet, Sons of Anarchy was a roman à clef about the Hells Angels. The show was intended to give viewers the vicarious experience of being a Hells Angel.
Authenticity
Sutter bragged on it. At the Television Critics Association press tour two months before Sons of Anarchy
premiered Sutter said, “I didn’t want to get involved with anything
that I felt I could not do authentically and, you know, I can’t mention
any organizations, but one of these organizations sort of opened their
doors to me, and I got to see it firsthand.” The “organization,” wink,
wink, was of course the Angels.
Everybody got that Sons of Anarchy
was supposed to be an inside look at the Hells Angels – even federal
appeals court judges. In 2014, Ed Carnes who was chief judge of the
Eleventh Circuit described a local gang called the Guardians as “a case
of life imitating art imitating life.” The Guardians Carnes said, were
“inspired by the fictional motorcycle gang in Sons of Anarchy, itself modeled on the real life Hells Angels.”
The very night Sons of Anarchy
premiered, on September 3, 2008, at virtually the same moment, the
president of the San Francisco charter of the Hells Angeles and,
reportedly, an advisor to the show, Mark “Papa” Guardado, died in a
street fight with a Mongol named Christopher “Stoney” Ablett. Almost
immediately the Sons had a dramatic antagonist “ripped from the
headlines.” Sutter called them the Mayans and they were a thinly
disguised interpretation of the Mongols.
Reality
Now Sutter and FX are going to
do an entire series about the Mayans and it seems logical to wonder what
impact this fantastical television program will have on at least three
criminal cases pending against the Mongols club or individual members.
The cases all accuse the Mongols of being the Mayans in disguise – which
in fact is exactly what the network just spent $1,529,001 in one week
trying to do.
The first of these cases will be United States v. Mongol Nation. It is now scheduled to begin on October 30, the day Mayans MC’s eighth episode will air. The government’s case against the Mongols, in a nutshell, is that they are really the Mayans.
The second case will be State of California v. David Martinez.
That trial is now scheduled for February 2019. Martinez is accused of
killing a Pomona, California Swat officer named Shaun Diamond as a Swat
team broke into Martinez’ home at four in the morning. The raid was to
serve a search warrant. It was, essentially an indicia search.
Police, knowing that Martinez was a Mongol, searched his home for
evidence that he was a Mongol. Which is to say, the police used their
powers to serve a search at four in the morning as a form of punishment.
Prosecutors will undoubtedly try to present his membership in his
motorcycle club as proof of his guilt.
And, 23 members and alleged associates
of the Mongols are facing numerous charges including murder in a federal
case in Clarksville, Tennessee. None of those cases have yet been
scheduled for trial. But chances are good that Mayans MC will still be
alive when there finally are trials.
Jury Tampering Or Art
The romantic fantasy FX is about to present to the world is going to influence all these cases in favor of the prosecution. FX
probably won’t address this problem because they will not see it as a
problem. Sutter and his fellow conspirators will see the conflation and
confusion they create as artistic virtue. Maybe Hollywood will, too.
Maybe Sutter will finally win an Emmy.
Maybe after he does somebody will be
able to ask him why he decided to make a fantasy set in the grim now
instead of a show set in the romantic long ago – when a collection of
disprized combat veterans, calloused to violence, not afraid of much
except possibly cobras and none of whom expected to live much longer
anyway, found each other after Vietnam and decided to start a motorcycle
club.
That one wouldn’t confuse jurors about
anything that has happened recently. Sutter has talked about making a
show something like that.
That’s the one I would have made, And
that’s probably just another example of why Sutter makes the big bucks.
Instead of you or me.