Hoon Lee

When it comes to pain, physical or emotional, one of the timeless cliches has been that we always hurt the people we love the most.

Penultimate episodes in a season of television usually suffer from over-reliance on exposition, because that’s just how they function. It’s something totally excusable, because these episodes are meant to build up to the big bang of the finale, which – if any show on TV right now could pull off – Banshee should be able to deliver with an exclamation.

One series, though, is leading the charge at the beginning of the year. The most unlikely of heroes, Cinemax’s Banshee, in just a matter of three weeks, has matured into something truly special – something a lot of TV writers refer to as “appointment viewing” when describing other series.