‘Sons of Anarchy’ season 5 finale: Kurt Sutter talks longer episodes (video)

With the season 5 finale of “Sons of Anarchy” coming up on Tuesday, it only seems appropriate that we hear from Kurt Sutter one more time, no? With that in mind, we present the newest chapter of his “WTFSutter” video series below. (This is Sutter, so there’s always a warning out there for language … though this one is more tame than we have seen in the past.)

For this edition, the showrunner (who also plays Otto on the show, and has gotten plenty of burn this year because of it) was actually joined by his wife Katey Sagal, and the two discuss all sorts of topics related to the show, whether it be Sutter’s performance as an actor, Donal Logue’s recent arrival as a U.S. Marshal out for revenge, or why the episodes lately have gotten to be as long as they have. (The past few have all clocked in at 90 minutes, including commercials.)

While we are hardly complaining about this, Sutter did provide a very understandable explanation for all those interested that due to the stakes of the show, everything that they do requires a little more time:

“These scenes that you used to be able to kind of roll through take so much screentime [now] because they are so much thicker, there is so much more going on … The worst thing you can do is start gutting these scenes.”

Sutter commented later that he could have easily made the finale four hours had he wanted to, as there really was that much going on when it came to his script. Luckily, he has the opportunity to work with someone like John Landgraf at FX who is careful to recognize creativity, and therefore willing to adjust schedules because of it from time to time. A good episode, after all, should never be restricted to a specific run time while sacrificing quality.

If you want to check out some more scoop on the future of Logue’s character, you can do so over at the link here.

Photo: FX