Banshee executive producer Adam Targum joins Television’s Most Wanted to talk about the final season of the show….
By Michael Stets — Staff Writer
On this week’s episode of Television’s Most Wanted, Damon Martin and Michael Stets break down the latest episode of Banshee titled “Innocent might be a bit of a stretch” and discuss the reveal of the serial killers, and the arrival of Special Agent Veronica Dawson.
In addition to our usual discussion of all things Banshee, executive producer and writer Adam Targum was a guest of the podcast and he spoke with Stets about how he was a fan of the first two seasons Banshee before joining co-creator Jonathan Tropper and the rest of the creative team for Season 3 of what he calls a “once-in-a-lifetime show.”
“Honestly it was the most exciting opportunity of my career,” said Targum, who is currently in production for a new Cinemax show called Outcast. “Very seldom–certainly as a television writer–do you get to pick and choose the job that you really want. It’s hard to get a job and you are offered shows and you make decisions based on a lot of factors. This is the first time I was actually a big fan of the show before I was actually given the opportunity to work on it. I was a big fan of Jonathan’s. I was a fan of the first couple of seasons of Banshee, so when I was asked by Cinemax–who I’d been developing some stuff with whether I wanted to sit down with Jonathan, I was like, ‘absolutely.'”
Targum was, of course, attracted to being part of a show where pretty much no idea is ever out of bounds. He said he hit it off with Tropper and the others right away and it’s their mutual affection for 80s action films and willingness to embrace some of the “tropes and cliches of television” that makes the show so successful and fun to work on.
“Instead of leaning away from them we leaned into them,” said Targum, who had worked on network television for almost 15 years before Banshee. “And if you take them by the throat and you embrace them and you say, ‘okay, you know what? we are gonna actually lean into them and take them to the nth degree.’ That’s what always makes Banshee such a unique show. There is nothing else out there like that because we go, ‘you know what? Of course we are living in a world where everybody solves their problems with guns or machetes or vices.'”
Now that we’ve seen in last week’s episode that the serial killer is actually a cult of Satanist cannibals, Targum was asked to explain what went into making that decision.
“Here’s the thing, we joked that the one thing Banshee has never had is Satanists,” he said with excitement. “I will tell you that our job this season was to betray all expectations. Anything that people expect in the last four episodes of this series, I think we are going to defy what they are expecting. Our satanists are not like any other Satanists. this is not going to play out like anyone thinks it’s going to play out. We certainly did the Banshee version of it.”
As for if a major cast member gets killed off or we actually find out Hood’s true identity, Targum teased, “I will say this: anything is possible. I will also say there will be more bloodshed in Banshee.”
