14 DAY TRIAL // “Sons of Anarchy” is back on air, with season 6 premiering on FX last night. This also means that there’s a new controversy around the Kart Sutter-created hit series, one that Sutter himself chooses to just shrug off.
*Spoiler warning: don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the season 6 premiere yet.*
The season premiere episode ended with footage of a young boy going into a school with a gun he had kept in his backpack, and going on a killing spree.
Sutter did think that such images, albeit only implied, might strike too close to home after the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut but, on the other hand, he did not want to compromise his art for the mere possibility of feedback.
Eventually, he decided to stay true to the story and his storytelling, he tells TV Guide.
“When the shootings recently happened ... I thought, ‘Am I just going to be swinging in the breeze if I tell this story?’” he says.
“But then I also felt like, ‘I'm not going to not tell this story because I'm afraid that I'm going to get some blowback.’ The best thing I could do as a storyteller was try to do it in the most organic way,” he explains.
Before the episode went into production, he went to network bosses for approval, he continues by saying.
FX Networks CEO John Landgraf has Sutter’s back on this, stressing for the same magazine that the episode isn’t meant to milk on a national tragedy.
“If you're going to portray things, you should portray them honestly and fully, and you should be willing to confront the consequences of it. My only point of view, and fortunately Kurt shared it, was... we just didn't want to see anything on-camera,” Landgraf says.
“It was understood from the get-go that he was going to find a way of portraying it that was respectful, that was non-explicit,” he adds.
The actual shooting isn’t portrayed in the episode, because the camera pans out after the boy walks into the school, focusing instead on the boy’s diary entries.