Banshee: Season 1

[tartysuz]

This is the first thing I read about Banshee:

"Cinemax's next original action series, produced by Alan Ball. Pennsylvania Dutch Noir! Three words I never thought I'd see together! Premieres January 11. So far in the various teasers there's what appears to be a transgender assassin, a giant albino, and Ben Cross."

I didn't think it was real. Oh, but it is!

Granted, the situations might be outrageously unrealistic. (Minor spoilers: Would a guy like Lucas really try to pull off heists in a county near the one where he's posing as the sheriff? Would he really not get extra time for assaulting the prison psychologist? And that trans assassin, master thief, hacker, hairdresser? What is this, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles?)

But as devilc says, the show is structurally brilliant. There's a large cast of supporting players whose stories mirror, parallel, and play off each other at a literary level, besides their plot-specific entanglements.

One of the knocks on the show is that it's full of gratuitous sex and violence. It's also one of the show's charms. I call on this quote by Katie Dunneback from the Library Journal: "For erotic romance, the development of the relationship again is the focus of the story, but here the sex scenes are the primary way in which the development is revealed to the reader." (This applies to the violence as well. It's an action romance.)

That's how you can have a show that's ultra-violent, has a lot of nudity and depictions of sex, and is a character-centred show.

Comments

[devilc]

Alchemise has a fantastic Banshee focused essay about women and violence and fighting.

She's damn'd right. It's not that often that you see a woman stand equal to a man in terms of a knock down, drag out fight.

[tartysuz]

Thanks! Alchemise's piece is great.

I was also thinking of the criticism that sometimes the violence between men and women is unreal because women are typically less able to stand up to trained fighters in real life.

But the world of Banshee is unreal, yet the writers weren't satisfied with leaving it at, "Oh, it's all just fantasy." They seeded Anna's victories in 1.09 and 1.10 by dropping in scenes of her training to fight and shoot all along.

[ixchel55.livejournal.com]

I downloaded the first ep just after it aired by I haven't gotten around to watching it. I think you and kadymae have tipped me over into the desire to jump right in.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

Yes, do it!