Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter has signed a three-year joint deal with Twentieth Century Fox and FX Productions. The contract will take Sons of Anarchy through its sixth season. Sutter's plan for Sons of Anarchy has always been seven seasons, and it is assumed that FX will give him what he wants. "FX ratings juggernaut Sons of Anarchy is coming back for at least two more seasons, " The Hollywood Reporter reports.
The long term renewal of Sons of Anarchy gives Sutter the freedom to tell the story on his own terms. He's not beholden to ratings and he doesn't have to worry about cancellation if the ratings were to dip. Not that Sutter has had much to worry about in terms of ratings. Sons of Anarchy is FX's highest-rated show in the cable network's history.
Because the new contract binds both Sons of Anarchy and also Sutter, personally, to FX, one starts to wonder if FX or Twentieth Century Fox has aims to put Sutter to work on other projects. So far, Sutter has remained firm on his stance that he will remain committed to a single television project. “A lot of overall deals enable studios to then put you where they feel you would best serve them, and not that that’s not a good thing and not that that hasn’t served other people well, I just know myself well enough to know that that’s probably not the thing for me,” he told THR. FX president John Landgraf echoed his sentiment. “We’re not in the Law & Order business. We’re not in the business of moving one showrunner out and another showrunner in,” Landgraf said.
Maybe he was just excited about the new-found closeness with his corporate overlord, but Sutter made some comments to THR that surprise me a little bit. Sutter strikes me as the kind of guy that would be all for showrunners setting specific end-dates for their shows. It gives the showrunners control over plotting of the final season(s), and thus gives them a certain kind of power.
And yet, Sutter said this: “There’s a part of me that does see being able to tell this story in seven seasons, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to say, ‘That’s it.' I almost feel like when you hang that kind of finality and put a period on something, there’s almost a backlash that happens with the fan base." " He also had this to say, "If there’s more story to be told after seven seasons and if financially it’s still a feasible endeavor, I’m definitely open to doing more.”
Hmmmmm. Interesting. I always assumed that, from Day One, Sutter had a pretty solid idea of where he wanted the show to be after seven seasons. Perhaps the plotting of the back-half of the series will be a little more fluid than I thought it would be.
