10 Great TV Shows That Lost It By The End
6. Sons Of Anarchy
Creator and showrunner Kurt Sutter isnt a man to suffer fools gladly or take criticism well. Completely convinced of the quality and importance of his ultra-violent biker melodrama, hed elect to run out the seventh and final season to bring his story to the conclusion he wanted, despite ratings being at an all time high.
Thats a commendable attitude for a showrunner, and its a testament to cable network FXs faith in Sutter that they allowed him to do so. Its also testament to their faith in him that they allowed him to amp up the running time of each episode, something that began around season five but snowballed into overkill in season seven.
We can understand the season premiere running to seventy-four minutes, but almost every episode of the final half of the season hits a similar mark. If it was just that there was too much story to tell wed get it, but when theres so much ponderous pacing, unnecessary dialogue, irrelevant scenes and completely redundant characters being introduced fundamentally, someone needed to tell Sutter that his show was suffering through his refusal to maintain a tight focus, and clearly no one was prepared to do that.
Its not just the tortuous storytelling, however. Seasons one to six gave us Jackson Teller, a young biker struggling to reconcile a love of his motorcycle club with the increasingly toxic atmosphere and lifestyle that surrounds it and the clubs president, his widowed mothers second husband. As time went on, Jax became more and more compromised, legally and morally, until eventually it became clear that he was becoming a man he should despise.
By season seven, the murder of his wife has Jackson acting far worse than his despicable stepfather ever did. In order to make it to the end, were forced to follow him through horribly long, often monotonously brutal episodes as he destroys the last vestiges of goodwill we had for him something Sutter has in common with Jax by the overlong, undercooked finale.