Think of the new FX series, “Sons of Anarchy,” as a kind of Mafia on Motorbikes — which does sound better than “The Sopranos on Skates.” The creation of writer Kurt Sutter, a veteran of FX’s pulse-pounding police drama “The Shield,” and with a pilot episode directed by “Sopranos” alumnus Allen Coulter, “Sons of Anarchy” plunges us into the world of an outlaw biker club in the town of Charming (pop. 17,000), near Oakland, Calif. Despite running guns, blowing things up, and killing people, the Sons adhere, Mafia-style, to a strict, insular moral code and their own sociopathic version of “family values,” which they uphold above all else.

The series, which makes its premiere tomorrow at 10 p.m., wears its ambition, along with plentiful insignia and tattoos, on its sleeve. Mr. Sutter has said he wants to create “a West Coast version of ‘The Sopranos,'” and like that series, “Sons of Anarchy” is a family drama within the larger confines of a criminal organization run along familial lines. The British actor Charlie Hunnam plays Jackson “Jax” Teller, the golden-locked son of John Teller, the deceased founder of the “Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original,” known as Samcro.

Jax, who looks and behaves like a swaggering Kurt Cobain minus the stomachaches, has a touch of Hamlet-itis about him, despite his ability to take swift action by, for instance, smashing someone over the head with a pool cue. However, if Jax is a Hamlet figure — with growing doubts about the betrayal of his dead father’s vision for Samcro, or of the wisdom of executing people in cold blood to send a “message” — he has the double misfortune of having a mother, Gemma Teller Morrow, who seems to be channeling Lady Macbeth. After John’s death, Gemma (brilliantly played by Katey Sagal, of “Married with Children” fame) married Clarence “Clay” Morrow (Ron Perlman), one of the club’s founders and a close friend of her late husband. Together, Clay and Gemma have perverted John’s late-’60s vision of the club as a band of essentially nonviolent Vietnam veterans into an arms-dealing crime syndicate whose pretensions to moral integrity have grown increasingly threadbare while its members continue to savor the glamour of being hard-riding, macho dudes.

But why wouldn’t they savor it? Bikers have been objects of fascination at least since Marlon Brando donned a leather jacket for “The Wild One”; Hunter Thompson wrote an entire book about the Hell’s Angels; “Easy Rider” helped launch Hollywood’s golden era of the 1970s, and the California-based poet Thom Gunn immortalized the peripatetic biker lifestyle of the 1950s in “On the Move,” a much-anthologized poem with Existentialist overtones (“One is always nearer by not keeping still.”).

Jax aside, this is a pretty grizzled bunch of bikers, with the graying facial hair to prove it. Leader-of-the-pack Clay has arthritic hands, making it increasingly hard for him to control the 700-pound monster between his thighs; another of the club’s co-founders, Piney (William Lucking), has to suffer the indignity of riding with an oxygen tank to ease his emphysema. Naturally, such ailments don’t improve their tempers. But that, too, is part of the legend. The poet James Fenton satirized the entire biker mystique in a piece pointedly called “The Wild Ones,” in which he recast the two-wheeled icons of road and page and screen as a bunch of irritable, hirsute South American rodents. Dietary habits aside, Mr. Fenton’s description of his rodent-roadsters matches some of the show’s characters pretty well: “Insulted by a comment, in a trice / They whip their switchblades out beneath your nose. / Their favorite food is elephant and rice. / Their personal appearance is revolting. / Their fur is never brushed and always molting.”

Appearances are the least of Samcro’s problems, however. A rival gang known as the Mayans is causing Clay and his men no end of problems, and the first episode revolves around Clay’s determination to show them who’s boss. The Nords, a similarly grizzled, drug-dealing, white-supremacist outfit, are less of a problem, but have to be dealt with nonetheless. There is also a black gang in Oakland whose leader must be placated at a time when the club’s funds are low. Though only the Nords are depicted as racists, the ethnic harmony of which Northern Californians tend to be so proud is not exactly a feature here. The Mayans are casually referred to as “wetbacks,” and perhaps in later episodes we shall learn their own preferred terms of abuse for the pallid old American bikers they’re at war with.

The underlying theme in “Sons of Anarchy” is the corruption of children by their parents. To Gemma’s alarm, Jax discovers an unpublished memoir left behind by his father, outlining the old man’s view of what the club should be. Worried that it will influence him, she instructs Clay to “toughen him up,” which means getting Jax to murder someone. Opie (a superb Ryan Hurst), another young club member who has just spent five years in jail and is now trying to go straight, is told by his father to “grow a d— and stop whining,” and get back on board with Samcro (he’s an explosives expert). So far, only Jax’s high school sweetheart, Tara (Maggie Siff, who lit up the first season of “Mad Men” as the Jewish heiress who ruffled Don Draper’s cool), looks likely to hold out.

On the plus side of the ledger, Samcro fights to keep drugs out of Charming (hence their enmity with the meth-dealing Nords), and in their way they help to preserve the town’s traditions and maintain law and order. The aging police chief is in their pocket, but his young deputy, David Hale (Tayler Sheridan), is itching to take over and wipe Clay out. As far as he’s concerned, Samcro is just a bunch of “white-trash thugs.”

Often extremely violent and profane in the typical FX manner, “Sons of Anarchy” is off to a good start. It’s action-packed, but held together by subtle performances, and suffused with a melancholy gloom from a more idealistic past that hangs over the characters like a shroud.