Banshee TV series season 1 on Blu-ray. Created by Jonathan Tropper and David Schickler, who serve as executive producers along with Alan Ball, the show is set in a small town in Pennsylvania Amish country – and stars Kiwi actor Antony Starr (Outrageous Fortune) as an ex-convict who improbably becomes sheriff of a rural, Amish-area town, while also cooking up plans that serve his own interests…

After completing his 15 year prison sentence, an ex-con (Starr) tracks down his former partner, now known as Carrie Hopewell (Ivana Milicevic), in Banshee County Pennsylvania who it turns out is now married to the local DA and has two children. He takes her at her word when she says she doesn't have any of the cash they stole. Later at a roadside bar, he meets the county's new Sheriff, Lucas Hood who has literally just arrived in town and has yet to meet anyone. When Hood is killed during an attempted robbery, the ex-con assumes his identity.

Banshee is riddled by corruption, with an Amish overlord, Kai Proctor (Ulrich Thomsen), brutally building a local empire of drugs, gambling and graft. With the help of a boxer-turned-barkeeper named Sugar Bates (Frankie Faison), Lucas is able to stay on even footing with Kai and his thugs, and even manages to bring a measure of tough justice to Banshee. But eventually, Lucas’ appetite for pulling heists pulls him and Carrie into a dangerous cauldron of duplicity, exacerbated when Mr. Rabbit (Ben Cross), the NY mobster they once ripped off, closes in with vengeance on his mind.

Banshee TV Show Season 1 Review

"I've been at this since 2003 and have reviewed over 2,500 releases. I've tried to be measured and fair, cautious to avoid hyperbole and genuinely interested in maintaining a reputation for equity and critical approach. Cool? Okay, now I'm about to give a Cinemax original series a perfect score…

I'm not being contrarian or edgy or click-happy: Banshee is the most entertaining TV series I've seen in who knows how long and based on the calculus of “pure enjoyment of the medium,” it earns the triple digits in the box score. But more than that, it's a genuinely good show, well-acted, well-plotted and filled with memorable characters. The fact that it's on Cinemax—and all the baggage and expectations that may come with that—should in no way dissuade you from tracking this down.

Fresh off the success of Strike Back (a fun show in its own right, but not in the same league as this one), the little brother network to big brother HBO obviously went looking to boost its portfolio, while also maintaining the, um, nuances, that we've come to expect from anything gracing the Cinemax airwaves.

So, yes, there is a hefty amount of violence and foul language and nudity, but I'll give the writers this much: the debauchery makes sense in the context of the story. As much as I got a kick out of Strike Back, the overwhelming “Cinemaxiness” of the T&A turned into parody. Lucas Hood gets up some boudoir tomfoolery, but it served story and character; in Strike Back, there'd be super-serious plot points and then out of nowhere it's backstage at the AVN awards.

But Banshee is great not because of its reluctance to be enslaved to a minimum threshold of boob exposure; it's great because it's great. Lucas Hood is a brilliant character, an antihero like no other and played perfectly by Starr. A criminal masquerading as a sheriff is storytelling gold and it continually pays off in big ways creatively. Lucas's brutish, no-rules methods to fight crime often leave his cop underlings staring aghast, but to detail the myriad way in which he breaks rules and throttle bad guys would do a gross disservice to the surprises that await.

Surrounding Hood is a rich motley crew: a boxer-turned-bartender-turned-confidant (Fankie Faison), a cross-dressing hacker (Hoon Lee), the estranged girlfriend (Ivana Milicevic) trying to play mom and wife with a handgun always at the ready and, finally, Kai Proctor (Ulrich Thomsen) the local slaughterhouse-owner/crime-lord, shunned by his Amish family, with eyes on complete domination of Banshee. I know these creations sound contrived, born of the fever dream by a dime-store novelist, but the personnel pulling them off are top-notch, and their unique stories intersect perfectly, culminating in fountains of blood… As far as serialized pulp goes, I have seen nothing better." DVD Verdict