Shocking news from Netflix today, as controversial showrunner Kurt Sutter has abruptly departed his new series The Abandons. The show is reportedly in the final weeks of production on its first season. Perhaps Kurt took the title a bit too literally? Sutter, who’s best known for his work on Sons of Anarchy , is famous for his commitment to his singular artistic vision.
That makes him a bit of an awkward fit at Netflix, where execs have a reputation for micromanaging. Today’s Deadline report claims that Sutter clashed with his streaming bosses over the running time of The Abandons’ pilot. Sutter’s cut of the episode allegedly clocked in at one hour and forty minutes.
When trimming it down to a more conventional sixty minutes proved impossible, the decision was made to split the episode in two. This created new challenges, and Sutter and his team were tasked with writing new scenes that would unite the first and second episodes. Deadline is reporting that those scenes were shot but never filmed.
And observers are taking that as an indication that Netflix execs were not happy with what they read. Sutter, it seems, was displeased with their criticism, and the partnership came to an abrupt end. Interestingly, production had reportedly run smoothly until the final three weeks.
The big-budget Western, which stars Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson was slightly over budget, but plans were in place to mitigate the damage by trimming one day of filming from the end of the schedul.