Sons Of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter Didn’t Initially Have A Full Seven-Year Plan For The Series – Looper

It’s impossible to predict whether or not a TV series is going to be a hit. For Kurt Sutter, it was never assumed that “Sons of Anarchy” would run for seven years. Therefore, he didn’t have most storylines set in stone.

“I learned that the looser my grip was on that, the better the show was,” Sutter told Variety. He added, “… what creatively got me excited about the work was that I never knew how we were going to get there. I never knew what the stories were going to be. I didn’t know how the characters would evolve. I didn’t know which characters would become essential in the revealing of the mythology.”

Jax Teller’s tragic ending was something Sutter did have in mind from the beginning, but the finer details of the biker’s chosen death took time to finalize. The show creator revealed to The Washington Post that, at first, he considered leaving Jax’s fate open-ended. Did he veer into the truck, or change his mind at the last second? Sutter said, “… I felt like this has not been a show of ‘what ifs,’ to a certain extent. This has always been a show about direct, specific choices and direct, specific consequences. So I realized I needed to be clear in terms of whether it happened or it didn’t.”

Sutter may not have drafted a seven-year plan, but his tactic of letting the story naturally unfold paid off in the long run. This is especially evident when looking at the 9.26 million viewers who tuned in for the “Sons of Anarchy” series finale in 2014, as reported by Variety.