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Kurt Sutter announces The Bastard Executioner’s cancelation with notoriously horrific font

Kurt Sutter announces The Bastard Executioner’s cancelation with notoriously horrific font

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A truly unsightly font, for a truly canceled show

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The Bastard Executioner, made by FX drama magnum and Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, is not a show I have seen. Nevertheless, it is a show that I do not believe I would like. It is, or rather was, a 14th century, Western European warfare-based show with a sprawling character list and a dedication to violent sexiness and sexy violence. Did you know that there is a show called Game of Thrones that is currently making a premium cable channel a lot of money? I digress.

This show, which I did not watch, was allegedly pretty close to too gross for human eyeballs. Given that there are literally hundreds of other things on TV, I wasn't actively begrudging anyone their choice to watch an allegedly gross show with an uninspiring elevator pitch. But after its ratings dropped by more than 50 percent after just six episodes, FX Networks CEO John Landgraf was. The show has been canceled after one season.

Here's my idea: Game of Thrones, but for us instead of for HBO

In the aftermath, Sutter took out a print advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter, in order to thank all of his friends and collaborators, and assure us all that he was leaving our airwaves on his own terms. The entire ad is written in Papyrus. Here it is, look at it:

Sutter also explained the decision to The Hollywood Reporter saying, "I don't want to write something that nobody's f—ing watching... There's a glut of period pieces on right now, and I'm sure timing has something to do it." There are a lot of period pieces on TV right now.

Game of Thrones

Anyway, the only thing in this world that is more basic than trying to sneakily make a Game of Thrones ripoff, is using the font Papyrus. Papyrus is a font best known for being tied with Comic Sans as the worst, most conspicuously overused font ever created. If you don't think this is an objective statement then please consider that the font's Wikipedia page contains the crowd-sourced fact that "Papyrus is often used where an antique look is desired, such as a coffee shop or church flyer." Here's a picture of a coffee shop near my alma mater that is known to be run by a semi-criminal cult. Here's a picture of another standard use of Papyrus.

This pull quote is in an okay font, in fact I feel really fondly toward it right now

If you can't picture at least 150 brochures you've been handed that were titled in Papyrus then honestly where have you been living and is it nicer than New York? Papyrus was also infamously used for the subtitles in Avatar, a movie which I hope you didn't see.

Also: did you know that someone made an unholy Comic Sans-Papyrus hybrid font?

papyrus

Papyrus is a terrible font, and we can all agree on that. In fact, we already have.

RIP to Kurt Sutter's apparently "meh" show. Hopefully his next one, which is "contemporary — and there's no horses involved," will be better.