Banshee

Our Review

Cinemax’s criminally underseen masterpiece of violence and bad decisions. An ex-con (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.