“You’ve taken this sheriff thing about as far as it should have gone,” says Sugar Bates to Lucas Hood, in the upcoming second season of Banshee. Frankie Faison plays Bates, and he’s acting opposite Antony Starr who plays the hero of the show.
In the first season of Banshee, Starr, a career criminal just released from prison after 15 years, drifts into the bar Faison runs in the titular Pennsylvania Amish town. He then casually assumes the identity of the new sheriff—a man who was murdered by thugs, just minutes after arriving in town himself. This left Starr’s Lucas well situated to keep an eye on his former lover and partner-in-crime, Carrie Hopewell (Ivana Milicevic). Carrie had gone on the lam and made a new life for herself as the wife of the local district attorney and mother of two kids—the oldest was actually fathered by Lucas. In the meantime, he has to remain wary of Mr. Rabbit, the ruthless Ukrainian mobster who he’d betrayed and who happens to be Carrie’s father.
It sounds ludicrous, but in the show’s first season, that was part of the fun. Like Strike Back, Cinemax’s other late-night action series, Banshee was pure pulp. Set in a hothouse world, it had generous helpings of gratuitous nudity, sex, and comic-book violence, but enough real human feeling in some of the performances (Milicevic’s especially) to ground it and give viewers a stake in the proceedings. There was also a good joke at its center: Lucas Hood, professional psycho, is the last person in the world who should have been equipped with a badge and a gun. For instance, he “resolved” a hostage situation at the local high school by marching in and blasting the bad guys with his “peacemaker.” Some cops outside wanted to see him charged for a crime, or in a straitjacket, but others shrugged. Sure, he may not do everything by the book—but he gets results!
If Banshee’s first season, at its best, was a gleeful binge on pop storytelling at its most disreputable, the second season feels like the hangover. Right from the start, things are slower and more turgid. Then, in a plotline about how the cultural and sexual repression of the Amish leads to violence, it turns pseudo-serious in a way that’s all too familiar in shows with Alan Ball’s name prominent in the credits. (He’s one of the executive producers.)