A few years ago, Sons Of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter announced his return to TV with Netflix’s The Abandons, which he created and wrote as an epic Western series. Filming appeared to be going swimmingly from an outside perspective with Sutter regularly Instagramming his on-set perspectives, but clearly, something went seriously amiss at the eleventh hour.
As the lore initially went, Netflix had been shopping around for a Western series, and let’s be honest, that quest to do with the Taylor Sheridan Effect over at Paramount+, which was ironic considering that Sheridan portrayed Deputy Hale on SOA and was not thrilled with how that show wrote him off. Are we suggesting, however, that Sutter meant to hop on the Sheridan bandwagon? Hell no. Sutter stepped up to the challenge after being inspired by a Bonanza bingewatch and declaring, “I do love the genre, and over the pandemic, I tried to get a western IP.”
Still, the latest rise of the Western is a trend that Hollywood has been chasing. That Effect even extends to photoshoots to promote an A24 wrestling biopic with Westerns popping up everywhere on streaming services. Fast forward to this month, and things fell apart with Sutter’s involvement in The Abandons. The show is still going to surface on Netflix, so let’s not waste any more time in piecing together what to (and what not to) expect from the troubled series.
Plot/Logistics
First, let’s refresh on the show’s plot synopsis:
As a group of diverse, outlier families pursue their Manifest Destiny in 1850s Oregon, a corrupt force of wealth and power, coveting their land, tries to force them out. These abandoned souls, the kind of lost souls living on the fringe of society, unite their tribes to form a family and fight back. In this bloody process, “justice” is stretched beyond the boundaries of the law. The Abandons will explore that fine line between survival and law, the consequences of violence, and the corrosive power of secrets, as this family fights to keep their land.
Sutter loves a good matriarch story, and with The Abandons, he worked in two overarching examples. Over a year ago, he told Tudum that the show will illustrate “what must transpire to drive the morally sound to become the dangerously corrupt,” and “The Abandons explores those complex compromises through the most powerful human instinct — the love and protection of mothers.”
Filming began earlier this year, and as noted above, Sutter outwardly seemed to be happy with where the production was going, but things presumably got too epic as reported by Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva:
The departure is believed to stem from creative differences over the direction of the big-scale production as it is wrapping filming and headed into post. I hear an alarm went off at Netflix when the initial cut of the dense first episode, which sets the scene and introduces the large group of main characters, came in at 1 hour and 40 minutes. Cutting that down to an hour proved impossible, so a decision was made for the episode, written by Sutter and directed by Bathurst, to be split into two. That required creating a cliffhanger in the middle of the episode with additional scenes on both ends to wrap the premiere and kick off Episode 2.
Given that the season was nearly done filming, “creative differences” feels like pushing the definition of that term in this situation.
Still, Sutter is known to suddenly leave a production, as was the case with SOA spin off Mayans M.C.. With that incident, he admitted to have written an anti-Disney joke into the biker soap opera as a form of protesting the Disney/FX merger. He also called himself “an abrasive dick” after he admittedly “ruffle[ed] a few mouse ears” of incoming Disney overlords. This followed him preemptively pulling the plug on The Bastard Executioner after one season, although that was likely the best move with that medieval-set series but also sits as another example of Sutter making sudden moves, for better or worse.
Still, his departure from The Abandons felt shocking, mainly because Sutter created and wrote this baby, but filming has now entered its final weeks under the oversight of executive producers Rob Askins and Otto Bathurst.
Sutter hasn’t spoken on the subject of his departure at this time.
Cast
The ensemble cast is led by Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey, who will both portray the aforementioned strong matriarchs. Gillian’s character, Constance Van Ness, is a widow of a mining tycoon, although she manage to double that fortune, and Headey portrays Fiona Nolan, an adoptive mother of orphans.
Naturally and fortunately, several faces from Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy universe will be present. Those include Ryan Hurst (RIP Opie), Michael Ornstein, and Mayans M.C.‘s Clayton Cardenas.
From there, almost too many names exist to mention, but we will try: Patton Oswalt, Nick Robinson, Aisling Franciosi, Natalia del Riego, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Lucas Till, Lamar Johnson, Jack Doolan, Jonathan Koensgen, Katelyn Wells, Brían F. O’Byrne, Sarah Grace White, Michael Greyeyes, Marc Menchaca, Michiel Huisman, Toby Hemingway, and Haig Sutherland.
Release Date
The Abandons will somehow debut in 2025 without Kurt Sutter, which remains unbelievable.
Trailer
Netflix hasn’t dropped a teaser yet, but here is a recent clip from Sutter’s Pie podcast episode with Ryan Hurst (who always has to be mentioned with an “RIP Opie”), who explained how his real-life best friend, Jackson, convinced him to be Jax’s best friend on TV, too.