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As an aside, I'm shocked at what they can get away with on basic cable these days. We see the skin flayed off a man's back, a dead baby pulled out of his dead mother's womb, and an MFF threesome featuring bare breasts airbrushed of their nipples and sexual motions as raunchy as anything on HBO. The first time we meet the show's most important female character, she's on her knees, getting railroaded from behind by her evil husband. FX also broadcasts explicit shows like The Americans and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but this is a step above: It feels like an overt attempt at repositioning the network as a junior HBO or Showtime. If none of it is particularly fun, it's at least eye-catching in a grotesque way.Which is what makes it disappointing that for all the production values, they couldn't come up with a reason to make us care. Squint your eyes and you imagine how, without the gore and sex, The Bastard Executioner might have embraced chintzy, cheesy, high fantasy melodrama like a Xena, Hercules, or Legend of the Seeker. Instead, they've been enlisted to make a Hollywood-style hit that helps people justify paying for cable every month. There's plenty of time for the show to redeem itself—the rest of the season, and beyond that, whatever clever new directions might be found after some soul-searching. (AMC's Halt and Catch Fire was once mocked for its obvious ambitions as high drama, but following some creative rejiggering, the show has won acclaim in its second season.) At the very least, it'll make another network executive pause before saying in a meeting, "Why don't we try to make the next Game of Thrones?"Follow Jeremy on Twitter.The Bastard Executioner airs Tuesday nights at 10 PM on FX.On Motherboard:How Butter-Flavored E-Cigs Are Fueling a Vaping Controversy