Kurt Sutter sets Old West series The Abandons at Netflix

Deadline

The Sons of Anarchy creator and Mayans M.C. co-creator is set to fulfill a longtime dream of making a Western TV series with The Abandons, which is currently in development at Netflix. “I’ve always wanted to do a Western, even before Sons, and then Deadwood came out,” 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, ‘F*ck, 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.” Sutter adds of The Abandons: “I’ve always been fascinated with the origins of La Cosa Nostra, how these Sicilian peasant families were being more than marginalized 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 f*cking 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. That was an actual term of the period where it was this kind of catchall phrase that described the outliers, the orphans, the prostitutes, the cripples, the bastards, basically the kind of lost souls living on the fringe of society."