Kurt Sutter’s Western ‘The Abandons’ Rustles Up Series Order At Netflix
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Kurt Sutter has got the green light for his outlaw western series The Abandons.
The streamer has handed the Sons of Anarchy a ten-part series order for his period action drama, which was first revealed by Deadline a year ago.
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The series, which will see Sutter serve as showrunner and exec producer via his SutterInk banner, is set in the Old West.
It follows a group of diverse, outlier families pursuing their Manifest Destiny in 1850s Oregon when 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.
It marks Sutter’s second project at Netflix after he left his longtime home FX – he also has feature film This Beast, about a trapper’s battle with an elusive beast that is ravaging an 18th century English village.
Sutter told Deadline last November that he always wanted to do a western even before Sons of Anarchy or HBO’s Deadwood.
“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.”
He added that after one of his favorite FX execs, Danielle Woodrow, moved to Netflix, it was the fastest he ever set up a show.
He married a fascination with the origins of La Cosa Nostra with a pandemic rewatch of Bonanza, which became 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. That is my favorite neighborhood. We are on the Western Frontier, somewhere between the Dakotas and California, small cattle town, circa 1850. So, it’s post-Gold Rush, pre-Civil War, and then, some natural resource is discovered. You have this wealthy family, where the Hearst-like character comes in, and the aristocrats in Italy, and they try to buy out the ranchers. Most sell out, and then the ones that sort of refused are kind of forced out or tragically go away. But there’s this one group of families that won’t sell. They band together. They stand up to the oppressor. Choices are made. Some of them violent, and then, like the peasants in Sicily, they take matters into their own hands and create their own destiny,” he added.
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