Tarts Love a Lawman

A pity it is that Longmire doesn't return until summer, then we could have the current trifecta of excellent law shows from the most down to earth to the crackiest, but speaking of a show that's in a class all by itself in terms of being both a realistic law show and a sometimes over-the-top horror show full of high-octane nightmare fuel, I've got to go with NBC's Hannibal. I confess, I am a complete and total fannibal. How do I love this show? Let me count the ways:

• It has great witty dialogue and an often mordant sense of humor.


• It's got the best food porn


• It's one of the most beautifully, lushly shot shows in history.


• Added bonus -- because of the high production values of the show, fannibals are inspired to produce amazing fanart like this, and this and this, stuff so good the official NBC social media outlets repost it.

But mostly, I love this show because it is smart and it respects its audience; it feels like the sort of complex and nuanced programming that viewers have come to expect from HBO or AMC, not a major network. I cannot thank my fellow fannibals enough for their tireless campaigns of support when the show was on the brink, and I cannot thank NBC enough for having faith in it and waiting just a few episodes longer until it finally caught on. I like Hannibal because it takes time to show the small details of forensic science and investigations and how painstaking the work is. It's got a great, racially diverse cast, and in a couple of cases, male roles have been re-written as female roles. (In short, showrunner Brian Fuller gets it for the most part.) Hannibal also doesn't manufacture drama out of the FBI being the Keystone Kops (cough! cough! The Following), but rather it builds drama out of Hannibal Lecter's ability to pull off a long con on the FBI, especially Will Graham, the special investigator who doesn't yet realize he's currently hunting the man at his side.

Yes, S1 ends with Will Graham being down, but the fun part of S2 will be in seeing all the ways he's not out.

So, remember, come February 28, 2014,#EatTheRude.

The season five premier of Justified is highly anticipated in our house. Justified is a contemporary Western, with U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens enforcing his own brand of old school justice in the coal mining, insulated town of Lexington, Kentucky. The FX crime drama continues to deliver, with fantastic dialogue and compelling characters. Last season was a rollercoaster ride that began with a flashback of a body crashing into the street, the defective parachute and bags of cocaine spilling out around the corpse. That was the unsolved case of Waldo Truth, a mystery which developed to an exciting conclusion by the finale. There was also a Mafia crime family, Boyd and Ava's engagement, human organ trafficking, revival preachers, Arlo's death in prison, Winona's pregnancy, and the usual murder and mayhem. Of course, Raylan had to shoot people. He had a great line in season four, "Did you not wake up this morning thinking this was another opportunity to mess up some bad guy's day? I did."

I had a screenwriting teacher explain Westerns simply as, "Trouble rides in to town, or you ride out and find trouble." Most episodes of Justified are like this: either Marshal Givens drives into town and gets caught up in some local crime scheme, or he gets assigned a troublesome case by his superior, Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Art Mullen. Either way, everything usually ends up connected because it's a small place and there's only so much dirty money and heroin to go around. Justified's protagonist, played by the roguishly charming Timothy Olyphant, is a funny kind of fish out of water character. He's from Kentucky and never really fits in with the Marshals, being a cowboy amongst city types. When Givens is assigned to Lexington, he doesn't fit in with his old coal mining buddies because he's a law man and an outsider now. The popular Western themes of honor amongst thieves and personal justice seem especially modern in an American town ravaged by the current economic downturn. The sweet, sad story of Ellen May, addict and prostitute, had amazingly tender moments that went from violent, to humorous, to heart-breaking, to hopeful. Patton Oswalt's performance as Constable Bob in season four blew my mind. Justified started strong and has only gotten better.

The show I'm most looking forward to is Banshee.

The first thing I ever read about the show was a post by Scott Hicks on a message forum:

"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! Banshee has gun play, foreplay, and word play.

Antony Starr plays a hood who is let out of jail after serving 15 years for his part in a heist. He heads to a small town in Banshee County, Pennsylvania, where he's heard his old girlfriend, Anna, has moved. However, he finds that she's taken on a new identity and is now married with kids.

Rejected, dejected and aimless, he heads to the local tavern where he chats with the bar owner. Enter a lawman named Lucas Hood who's just arriving to take up the job of sheriff, followed by henchmen from the gang he's been hired to clean up: the Amish mafia! An over-the-top fight ensues, and everyone but the barman and the hood die. Seizing the opportunity to stay in town, the hood takes on the sheriff's identity. We never know the ex-con's name. For the rest of the season, the hood is Hood.

As Anna, Ivana Miličević gets to play the film noir anti-hero role that Robert Mitchum got to play in Out of the Past and Viggo Mortensen got to play in A History of Violence: a con who turns a new leaf and leads a quiet life in a sleepy town. She's not the femme fatale: the new Lucas Hood is. (But that's too easy for this show. Wait until you learn about their past!) When it's clear that he's staying, Anna believes she can still live two separate lives. Eventually, she realizes that the situation is untenable. The moment she realizes that she's at a crossroads, she is shown standing literally at a crossroads!

Hood and Anna's reformed faction (Dutch church humour there, folks!) also includes the crossdressing Job (pronounced the biblical way), an assassin, master thief, hacker, and hairdresser, brilliantly played by Hoon Lee: he's like Cinemax's version of Lord Fanny from The Invisibles.

These larger-than-life characters get into some outrageous and extremely violent situations, but underneath all that flash, Banshee is "structurally brilliant," as Katherine Keller noted on LiveJournal. It has a large cast of supporting players whose stories mirror, parallel, and play off each other on multiple levels over several episodes. For example, Hood and Anna mirror each other. The Amish mafia don who has a much-too-close relationship with his rebellious sexy niece is matched by the Native American casino-owning family with a kick-ass prodigal daughter who looks like she just walked in from the set of Nikita.

Banshee may be smarter than meets the eye, but sometimes, it's enough for the ersatz Sheriff Hood to smash a guy's head with a rock when a fist would have done. The show is frequently excessive, sometimes erotic, and always entertaining.