The pilot for “The Bastard Executioner” would have had to be a disaster for FX not to order a first season as it did; “Bastard” creator Kurt Sutter masterminded what was for years FX’s most popular series, the biker drama “Sons of Anarchy.”
There are no motorcycles in Sutter’s new project, which premieres this autumn and sounds to me like a 14th century “Equalizer” or “John Wick” or “Billy Jack.”
Logline:
“A period drama, The Bastard Executioner tells the story of a warrior knight in King Edward I’s charge who is broken by the ravages of war and vows to lay down his sword. But when that violence finds him again he is forced to pick up the bloodiest sword of all.”
(If that king sounds familiar, Edward I was played by the late Patrick McGoohan in “Braveheart.”)
The series stars Sutter himself, alongside his wife and “Anarchy” co-star Katey Sagal, Lee Jones (the Australian series “Magical Tales”), Stephen Moyer (“True Blood”) and Sam Spruell (“The Last Ship”).
Sutter may not like memorizing his own dialogue. In “Anarchy,” his character lost his tongue. In this new series, his character is mute.
If ABC ordered this instead of FX, would it be titled "The B Executioner"?
… the question about “The Bastard Executioner” isn’t, “Why does this tale of rebellion and subversion feature so much death and torture?” It's, "Why is this whole enterprise so tedious?" …
... The characters are many but thin, and compared with the lavishly imagined societies of “Thrones,” its 14th-century Britain is one turkey leg away from a Renaissance Faire. …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
... The series is not for the squeamish. But, as with “Game of Thrones,” the violence is not gratuitous but rather a necessary tool in telling the story. The Bastard Executioner not only hits the mark, it sets the bar very high for the rest of the fall season. …
... You know Chamberlain Milus Corbett (Stephen Moyer, “True Blood”) is true evil because he’s the only character here who isn’t exclusively heterosexual, and it’s shockingly lazy writing. But he’s not as one-dimensional as the Baroness Lady Love Ventris (Flora Spencer-Longhurst), an improbable reformer who would like to help the peasants. …
... saddled with a plotline that bothered me until the point at which it made me break into peals of hate-laughter. …
... a lightweight Game of Thrones, and sluggish one at that. There’s promise, but for now, the rewards are few, and even then, I worry. … I wish the storytelling was ambitious as the concept. The aesthetic is too conventional, the grit not gritty enough. The action is rote, and the depravity ranges from sick to shruggy. The acting needs to go next level, too. …
... In a TV landscape where Game of Thrones towers over this genre (there is decidedly more fantasy in Thrones), and Starz managed to pull in a fresh audience for Outlander, there’s a crowd willing to converge on and be still with slowly unfolding versions of historical fiction that take time to unwind. It’s entirely possible that whatever portion of Sutter’s devoted Sons of Anarchy fan base that doesn’t buy in will be replaced by people who never wanted any part of a motorcycle gang story, even if it was Shakespearean — but they could readily buy into something as ambitious as Bastard Executioner. …
10 p.m. Tuesday. FX.
