Is this new show FX’s answer to Game of Thrones???
Genre: TV Pilot – Period
Premise: Set in the 14th century, a former knight of the English army infiltrates his old kingdom with the hopes of destroying it from the inside-out.
About: There aren’t many writers who are doing better than Kurt Sutter. The man moved to LA in 2000 and quickly got a writing job on hit show, The Shield. After that, he created Sons of Anarchy. He married Peggy from Married with Children. His script, “Southpaw” was just turned into a movie starring Jake Gylenhaal, and now he’s debuting his new series, The Bastard Executioner, this fall on FX. In a strange twist no one saw coming, goofball crooner Ed Sheeran will be cast as a character on the show. The Bastard Executioner debuts this fall on FX.
Writer: Kurt Sutter
Details: 64 pages
Uh, you had me at “Edward the Longshanks.” Looks like Sutter is just as big of a fan of Braveheart as I am, with Bastard Executioner taking place right after Longshanks rein. And just like Mel Gibson did before him, Sutter’s plan is to take an uncompromising look at the period.
How uncompromising?
Well, let me just say that there are men, as in servants, literally wiping other men’s asses in The Bastard Executioner.
Believe it or not, what I will hereby refer to as “the ass-wiping scene,” is one of the most important scenes in all of The Bastard Executioner. In it, a Baron is sharing his tax strategy with one of his co-workers while having a bowel-movement. Afterwards, a servant rushes over to wipe his ass.
Why is this scene important? Because it conveys to the audience that this was a different time. And that immediately helps sell the unique reality that is The Bastard Executioner. If everything we saw in this show was something we saw in other shows, or in our own lives, then there’s nothing unique to take us back to 14th century England. This one scene showed us: “This is a different world.”
Mel Gibson did this too in Braveheart. In an early scene when William Wallace was a child, his father dies in battle. Afterwards, we see the family cleaning the dead body for burial on their own. It was a reminder that back then, you didn’t have funeral parlors down the street. You had to do the dirty heartbreaking work all by your lonesome. Again, it SOLD the time.
So what about the rest of “Bastard?” Any good? Will this, indeed, be the next, “Game of Thrones?”
I don’t know about that. But there’s some pretty sweet stuff here. Basically, the show revolves around this ex-English knight named Wilkin Brattle whose fellow knights betrayed him and left him to die.
Unbeknownst to them, Wilkin survived and joined a small group of Scottish farmers, content with living a “normal” life. However, when the Brits raise the taxes on the Scots, Wilkin and a small band of friends start killing the tax collectors and taking the money back to the families.
The evil Baron Erik Ventris, the very man who betrayed Wilkin (and assumes him to now be dead), starts sniffing around for who this group of bandits could be, and eventually traces them back to Wilkin’s village. He and his knights kill every woman and child there, including Wilkin’s pregnant wife (we actually get a scene where the wife’s stomach is cut open and the unborn baby’s hand hangs out, lifelessly – youch!).
An understandably un-thrilled Wilkins then assumes the identity of an executioner who just moved into town, and infiltrates the very kingdom he used to fight for. A man who’s now responsible for dishing out death to those souls the British find guilty, will presumably begin a careful campaign of destroying the kingdom from the inside-out.
Sutter seems to be a better TV writer than he is a feature writer. And, actually, this pilot reminded me just how much easier it is to be original in television writing. You could feel Sutter being confined when writing, “Southpaw,” the restrictions of the boxing genre bearing down on him until he inevitably found himself giving us yet another variation of the Rocky format.
But here, you don’t know what the fuck is going to happen (spoilers follow). Almost everyone who you think is going to be a major character on the show dies. Right there. In the very first episode!
Wilkin’s pregnant wife, for example. Dead. Baron Erik Ventris. Dead. The executioner, Gawain Maddox, who’s probably the most interesting character in the entire pilot – DEAD. And it really made this first chapter of Sutter’s show exciting.
Sutter also uses a couple of timeless writing tricks to keep us invested. First, he sets up a “rebels versus the evil establishment” storyline. The British are stealing money from the Scots under the façade of “taxes.” We can’t help, then, wanting to see the Scots retaliate. A little movie called “Star Wars” used the “rebels” approach effectively as well.
Then they have the English brutally (and I mean BRUTALLY) kill the farmers’ wives and children. This turns our need for retaliation into a need for full-on revenge. I mean, seriously, who’s not going to want to read on after that scene?
But Sutter doesn’t stop there. He knows that that the more you hate the English, the more you’ll root for his characters. So he creates this backstory whereby Wilkins was betrayed by his fellow knights and left for dead.
He also doesn’t just make Wilkins wife a wife who’s killed by the English. He makes her a PREGNANT wife. It’s a seemingly small thing but Sutter is using every little trick in the book to make sure you feel anger towards Baron Ventris and the English.
Speaking of the wife, Sutter makes the wise choice of having us get to know her before she’s killed (which happens around the midpoint). I’ve seen writers write dead wives into the beginning of their stories, or even make them backstories, but those never hit as hard as if we get to know the character first. Heck, I was convinced that the wife was going to be one of the main characters of the show. So when she was killed off, I was devastated. And, of course, I wanted revenge!
The main issue I had with Bastard Executioner was the ending. (Major Spoiler!) While killing off Baron Ventris was a surprise, it immediately removed the giant villain from the story. So there was a certain part of me that thought, “He achieved his goal. Story over.”
I guess I’m not entirely sure, then, why he chooses to sneak into the kingdom and pretend to be an executioner. I suppose it’s to bring down the rest of the English and I’m sure that new villains will be introduced as the show goes on. But as of this moment, I’m not dying to get to the next episode. And that wouldn’t have been the case if Baron Ventris had lived.
However, the “secretly infiltrate the kingdom as an executioner” storyline wouldn’t have worked if Ventris was still alive because, obviously, Ventris would’ve known Wilkins wasn’t an executioner. So part of me wonders if Sutter painted himself into a corner here. Did he so badly want this Bastard Exeuctioner storyline that he literally killed off the best part of his story to get it?
I don’t know and we’ll have to see where the story goes from here. But this definitely didn’t have that same “cliffhanger” quality that the pilot for Game of Thrones had, where we end with a brother and sister fucking and the brother throwing a young boy off a tower. That’s something where you’re desperate to see what happens next. Here, part of me feels like the big problem has already been taken care of.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes we want things so badly in our screenplays, that we sacrifice other parts of the screenplay to get them. It’s your job as a writer to step back and look at the big picture. Decide whether making other parts of your screenplay worse are worth it just to make this part better. Time will tell whether Sutter killing his main villain off in the pilot was the right way to go, but as of this moment, he may have wanted to find a way to keep him, even if it meant sacrificing how Wilkins infiltrates the kingdom.
