Kurt Sutter is a man who clearly doesn’t like to be idle. Since establishing himself as a household name back in 2002 when he created The Shield, he’s made it his mission to always have a project on the burner. From The Shield, he moved onto Sons of Anarchy, before later tackling its spin-off Mayans MC, The Bastard Executioner, and somewhere in between, made time for Southpaw. So where is the master of revenge fantasies landing next? With Netflix, of course, with a brand new series about the Old West currently titled The Abandons.
“I’ve always wanted to do a western, even before Sons of Anarchy, and then Deadwood came out,” Kurt Sutter tells Deadline.
“There’s that great lore of Ian Anderson wanting to be a great rock guitarist, and he saw Clapton play, and he said, ‘Fuck… I’m going to become the best rock flautist that ever lived.’ And he did just that for Jethro Tull. This is how I felt when I saw Deadwood. I said, ‘Let me stick to the crime genre’ – and then used just about every actor that was on that show. But I do love the genre, and over the pandemic, I tried to get a western IP.”
Similar to Sons of Anarchy, Sutter explains the show will involve several families’ trajectory from ordinary, downtrodden citizens into gunslinging outlaws, set during a period before all the iconic outlaws we’ve come to know hit the scene, i.e. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy.
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“I’ve always been fascinated with the origins of La Cosa Nostra, how these Sicilian peasant families were being more than marginalised by the land barons and the aristocrats. These families banded together to defend themselves from these abusive land barons, and from that taking those matters into their own hands, La Cosa Nostra was born and became the authority and the law and the order of the land.”
“There are other influences. Over the pandemic, I was watching reruns of Bonanza, and first of all, it completely holds up. I remember watching it as a kid, but I just remember there’s an episode where somebody gets killed, and Hoss just wants revenge, and I mean, like, dark fucking revenge.”
“Ultimately, it’s a Sunday network TV ending, but I just realized that the Cartwrights were a bullet away from being outlaws, right? And I loved that it all came from that deep sense of loyalty to the family, the land, the town. Those were the origins of this, with the working title The Abandons.”
Sutter later elaborates the entire premise puts The Abandons on the run, meaning a change of locations across multiple seasons is on the cards. That is if multiple seasons get the greenlight.
As preemptive as it might be to say, this sounds like one to keep an eye out for.
