How interesting that play will be is hard to tell from the two episodes sent to critics, which are mostly spent setting up what feels like an unusually elaborate premise. “Banshee” is a different beast, an American Gothic noir with echoes of Jim Thompson, Frank Miller and, especially, Quentin Tarantino, and it presents a different set of images and clichés to play around with. Cinemax’s first two serious original series, “Strike Back” and “Hunted,” were both international thrillers, favoring exoticism in their guns, locations and naked women. The pace slows after those precredits pyrotechnics, a shift signaled immediately by the sight of the hero (the New Zealand actor Antony Starr), now on a motorcycle, cruising past Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in straw hats and white shirts. (An accompanying online and print graphic novel, “Banshee: Origins,” certifies the writers’ taste for cartoon-style storytelling.) This appears to be the first actual TV production either has been involved with.
While “Banshee” has television pros like Greg Yaitanes (“House M.D.”) and Alan Ball (“True Blood,” “Six Feet Under”) among its crew of producers and directors, it was developed and written by Jonathan Tropper and David Schickler, a pair of New York novelists and screenwriters with limited practical experience. Perhaps the hyperbolic opening of Friday night’s premiere - part comic book, part “Die Hard With a Vengeance” - reflects some nervousness, an instance of trying too hard to please, on the part of the show’s creators. Having checked those items off the hard-boiled mystery man’s to-do list, he branches out, tracking down an Asian hairdresser-drag queen from his past, getting shot at and chased through the streets of Lower Manhattan and narrowly avoiding death by a sliding double-decker bus. In the first few minutes the show’s unnamed hero walks out of prison and down some mood-setting railroad tracks, has sex with a waitress and steals a muscle car. A party thrown by Proctor for the new sheriff is spoiled by a crasher-a member of the redneck Moody clan who despise Amish people in general and Kai in particular.“Banshee,” the latest action-and-attitude series from Cinemax, comes on strong - almost comically so. Rabbit, the New York-based mob boss who wants revenge against Lucas and Carrie for the jewel heist that landed Lucas in prison. Itching for the thrill of thievery and yearning for Carrie, who is now the wife of attorney Gordon Hopewell and mother of two, Lucas inadvertently gets tangled up in the rampant corruption of shunned Amish gangster Kai Proctor, while keeping a vigilant eye out for Mr. Keeping his history a secret as he awaits forged papers, Lucas befriends boxer-turned-bartender Sugar Bates, and settles into his new life as Banshee's sheriff. In a bizarre twist of fate, a recently paroled master thief assumes the identity of Lucas Hood, sheriff-in-waiting of Banshee, PA-the same town where his former partner and lover, who changed her name to Carrie, relocated and remarried years ago.
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