Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter has taken out a full page ad in The Hollywood Reporter to announce that the axe has fallen on his latest series The Bastard Executioner, with FX opting against renewing the show for a second season following its finale last night.
“It’s fantastic to get a good review [or] an award, but at the end of the day the only thing that matters, really, is numbers,” Sutter tells THR. “My job as a storyteller is to share my vision while I engage and entertain an audience. If I don’t have that audience, I can’t do my job. So, I saw it coming. I saw each week that it didn’t hook, it didn’t necessarily land. With Sons, it premiered low but then it flatlined really quickly and by episode seven or so of that first season, it slowly started to tick up. With Bastard, we never hooked that core 2, 2.5 million viewers to build from.”
The 14th century period drama premiered with 4 million viewers in September, but that had fallen to almost half by the sixth episode, which pulled in just 1.9 million viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5&v=qXJL6jGfZhg
Originally published November 18, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
