“Guilty pleasure” should be a banned phrase. If a series is good, it doesn’t matter what genre it’s in. If you like it, own it. Who cares? The show that tests my belief, however, is Banshee. The action thriller, made for bratty HBO offshoot Cinemax, quite blatantly fills titillation quotas to attract young males. Nudity and an epic fist fight, every episode, guaranteed. It’s testosterone-siphoning wish-fulfilment. The guilt is real. But the pleasure is worth it.
Our hero is Lucas Hood, which isn’t his real name. The actual Lucas Hood was in a run-down boozer preparing for his first day as sheriff of Banshee, a small town in Amish country, Pennsylvania, when some no-good hick gangsters came in and shot him to pieces, not caring that there was one other customer at the bar. Once he’d polished off the simple task of killing these bozos, the mystery man – also new in town, fresh out of prison for a jewel heist – coolly stole Hood’s badge and assumed the dead guy’s cop duties. That the fake Lucas neither knows nor respects the law makes him brutally effective in the role.
Yeah, yeah, a maverick lawman beating up bad guys. Banshee is in a familiar setting, too: like True Detective, Justified or The Red Road, the vibe is of folk out there in the sticks stirring a simmering pot of Straw Dogs wickedness. The town is lost, doomed, drowning in drugs and drink, governed by organised crime and corrupted by old-time religion. Bad, bad things are behind every door.
Lucas (Antony Starr) takes a deep breath and flings those doors open. He is righteous. He batters villains partly because he excels at it, but mainly because he can see no other option. Take season one, episode three: a woman has been beaten and raped. The perpetrator is a champion cage fighter who, for reasons that make sense within the world of the show, can’t be arrested in the usual manner. So instead of bringing him in, Lucas brings him down, emerging half-dead but triumphant from five horrifying minutes of hand-to-hand combat.
In daily life, I’m a physical coward who has something to lose, so I’ve always picked flight over fight. The excitement of watching a character who takes the other path, especially since he so often does it to help people who aren’t so good with their fists, is wrong on every level, but it’s undeniable. It’s the prickly dilemma of the vigilante drama: meting out your own justice to deal with pushers, abusers and – in Banshee’s season-three opener that airs in the UK this week – racist murder can’t ever be condoned. Can it? At least Banshee’s extreme violence never lets us become desensitised. There are almost no guns, so every punch is felt, and every broken bone is – thanks to an Emmy-nominated sound department – sickening.
Lucas, the anti-hero who slowly sheds the “anti”, has an awesome regular antagonist who takes us further into fertile grey areas. Kai Proctor , a pale, elegant local businessman and murderer, was harshly expelled as a youth by his Amish family, and has now spectacularly rejected their moral code. Proctor is given a delicate mix of vulnerability, homicidal mania and a strange sort of integrity by the unnervingly controlled Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen. It’s a wonder Thomsen hasn’t been poached by Game of Thrones. Perhaps they’re too scared to ask.
Banshee is low on clever lines and wordy speeches. It’s physical, visceral storytelling, with all the fighting and fornicating there for a purpose and significantly hotter as a result. In fact, the whole show’s underpinned by a wrenching romance: Lucas has chosen to police this hellhole of a town because it’s where the love of his life, fellow diamond burglar Carrie (Ivana Miličević), has made a new life. In a sly bit of marital drama, she’s constantly torn between her husband – a lawyer and war hero who turns out to have no moral fibre – and Lucas, the guy from her wild past she just can’t shake. Carrie isn’t her real name.
Her choice is the same as ours: follow the head, which says Lucas/Banshee is abominable trash. Or give in and go with the heart, guts and groin.
Banshee season three, Thursdays, 10pm, Sky Atlantic
