Banshee
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
Cinemax’s criminally underseen masterpiece of violence and bad decisions. A former convict (Antony Starr, years before Homelander) gets out of prison and steals the identity of Lucas Hood, the incoming sheriff of Banshee, Pennsylvania, an Amish country town controlled by a crime lord with a brutal past of his own. The premise is a western in cop show clothing: the outlaw becomes the law, and the badge is just a license for more chaos.
Starr is a magnetic lead, Ivana Milicevic’s Carrie is the femme fatale who chose survival over love, and Ulrich Thomsen’s Kai Proctor, a former Amish crime king, is one of TV’s great villains: soft spoken, devout to his own dead religion, and utterly merciless. The fight choreography is the best ever put on TV: every brawl is ugly, exhausting, and has consequences. The Amish neo noir atmosphere makes it unlike anything else.
Verdict: Watch it. One of the great lost HBO-adjacent dramas, and Starr’s audition reel for Homelander.
