Amazon summary:
Pilot. Lucas Hood, a recently paroled master thief, assumes the identity of a rural Pennsylvania sheriff to elude mob vengeance and reunite with Carrie, his onetime lover and partner in crime.
I am Jon Snow.
I know nothing; well, nothing about Banshee.
Actually I know one thing from the Top 8 Magic podcast; which is that my BFF BDM is watching Banshee on the treadmill these days. That sounds like a recommendation, no?
I turn on the Banshee without so much as reading the Amazon summary you already have. This is what I find:
- 30 seconds in – Hood leaves a pretty rough-looking prison, walking into the dusty wilderness, before
- 1 minute in – Hood meets a super hot waitress at a roadside diner, then engages in some silent-but-serious bedroom eyes (resulting immediately in conversation-free sex in a not-bedroom with her), whereupon
- 1 minute 30 seconds in – Hood steals a pretty sweet sports car and drives to NYC then
- 2 minutes 40 seconds in – Hood busts up the seemingly legitimate salon-front of his old criminal associate Job (finally engaging in some dialogue); upon leaving he gets back into “his” car and
- 4 minutes in – Hood gets in what must have been a massively expensive street chase (production-wise) that results in an impressive orgy of crashing cars, flying bullets, collateral damage, and the upended doubledecker tour bus from this post’s hero image
At 6 minutes in Hood burgles a motorcycle and rides off into the sunset, evading a second salvo of gunplay.
AND THEN opening credits roll.
SIX MINUTES IN!
Well, they certainly got my attention.
“You had me at hello.”
The Banshee pilot slows down considerably from credits on, but never to the point that you can actually un-glue your eyes from the screen.
I certainly liked it enough to resolve to write something for our fledgling site!
Rather than traditional “episode recaps” I decided I would punch up some simplified Power Rankings for each installment. Here goes for “Pilot”:
While Job’s sashay getaway was a mite predictable, it was still cool (as in “refreshingly cool”) to see the difficult-to-peg salon-owning computer hacker blowing up the ostensibly much tougher / hella masculine bad(der) bad guys while pulling up stakes.
On the sex-violence-authority scale Hood really cashed in during the “Pilot”. He gets laid thirty seconds after his prison release; racks up 2.5 criminal bodies; and assumes the identity of the local constable, all before the Easter Egg. How great a day (or episode) did the next guy have to beat Hood out for El Numero Uno?
The show’s nominal antagonist shows off more twists and turns than the letter S in the first sixty minutes of Banshee. He seems to have enough resources to buy up all the local authority, is quick to knock out every tooth of the odd insubordinate subordinate (and instruct he puts them back in his mouth)… And then gets intimate with one of his [presumably criminally] kept women but not before dressing her like an Amish girl and revealing an as-yet-unexplained Jesus back tattoo to the audience mid-moaning. Authority! Violence! Sex! What’s up with this guy? More twists and turns than the letter S for Kai.
If you ever asked yourself how bad a day could get before it got really, finally, bad for a tv character… Find Moody’s ghost and ask him. Maybe he’ll be able to gum an answer out for you.
LOVE
MIKE
