Fans know Kurt Sutter‘s name in line with successful shows like Sons of Anarchy, The Shield and now Mayans M.C. But his ventures aren’t always so accomplished or anticipated — and that’s something he’s OK with.
After Sons of Anarchy ended in 2014, the bad-boy writer who sharpened his pencil on Shawn Ryan’s dark drama The Shield dived into the medieval times drama The Bastard Executioner, which lasted one season before FX CEO John Landgraf allowed Sutter to cancel it.
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When asked by The Hollywood Reporter what he learned from going from a record-breaking show like Sons of Anarchy to an ill-received drama like that, he said he realized he couldn’t change the show so much that it would become magically successful over the course of a few episodes.
“At the end of it there was this realization of, like, ‘I don’t know how we sustain this pattern.’ Landgraf asked me what I wanted to do, did I want to change things and blah, blah, blah? But I felt like, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. The story was the story,” Sutter said.
“But I’m also not the man in the high tower, I’m not doing this to tell stories to myself — I’m a storyteller and I need people to listen to my stories, and if we couldn’t find the audience, then to me it was like, ‘All right, it lived in the space and time it was supposed to and let’s not try to reinvent it or change it or manipulate it to sell it,’” he added.
Meanwhile, the first episode of Mayans M.C. premiered Tuesday night on FX after much anticipation from fans of Sutter and SOA. While the shows are certainly similar and even set in the same motorcycle club world, Sutter made it clear that he wants Mayans to be seen as its own separate work of art.
“I just wanted to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons,” he told THR of revisiting the Sons of Anarchy world. “I came into this project with a sense of, like, ‘OK, this is a thing that makes sense and I need to work and how do we do this.’ And it was [Mayans co-creator] Elgin James’ excitement about this world and this project that really made me excited about TV again.”
He continued, “I didn’t think that it made creative sense to be the sole voice of a show that takes place in an entirely different culture. I’d seen buddies of mine — great writers — try to do it on other shows and have failed miserably. So, I knew that I wanted to find a writer of color who knows the world and I met with a lot of writers, both men and women.”
Mayans M.C. airs Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. ET on FX.
