In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, Cinemax
Once upon a time, TV regarded cops as unimpeachable examples of morality. Whether it was Dragnet in the US or Dixon of Dock Green in the UK, cops did their jobs, stuck to the rules and never did anything bad.
Times changed, of course, albeit slowly. When writer GF Newman was pitching ideas to the script editor of Z Cars in the 70s, he suggested that one of the detectives be offered a bribe – and that the detective accept it. Newman was told: “Maybe this isn’t the show for you.” The script editor was right, because Newman went off and created his own show, the ground-breaking Law and Order (no, not that one), which depicted cops as corrupt, willing to bend and even break the law, and sometimes little more than criminals with badges.
This ambiguity continued through the 70s in the UK and into the 90s with the likes of Between The Lines all the way through to the present day with Luther.
In the US, while pretty much every cop show from the 80s onwards showed police who were ‘mavericks who didn’t play by the rules’, the police largely stuck to the rules. But again times changed, giving us first The Wire and then eventually The Shield, in which the corrupt cops committed almost as many crimes as the criminals they were supposed to be investigating.
Cinemax’s new show, Banshee, however, goes one further. All the shows I’ve mentioned are about cops who become criminals. But what if a criminal became a cop?
The show, exec produced by True Blood‘s Alan Ball, sees Lucas Hood (Antony Starr), one of the most notorious thieves in the US, get out of jail after a 15-year sentence for a diamond robbery. When he goes looking for his share of the diamonds from his former girlfriend and partner Anastasia Hopewell (Ivana Miličević), he ends up in the ultra-corrupt Pennsylvania town of Banshee, which coincidentally is expecting a new sheriff. When the sheriff is killed in a fight, Hood assumes his identity and becomes the new sheriff of Banshee, so that he can win Hopewell back, watch over the daughter he never knew he had and earn some money in the process, all while trying to evade Mr Rabbit (Ben Cross), a New York crime boss and Hopewell’s father, who’s been looking for her for 15 years.
Anyway, as you might expect, Hood uses criminal methods to do his job and the result is… interesting. Here’s a trailer.
