A novelist who came to television with one conviction, that a story should keep the audience frightened for somebody's body, and built Banshee on it. The result is well-staged pulp with a fiction writer's ear and a plotter's bad habits.
Fi1m perspective
The pilot of Banshee (2013) does its most important work on the first night. A thief just out of prison walks into a bar in a small Pennsylvania town looking for the woman he went inside for. The incoming sheriff is shot dead in front of him before he has reported for duty, and by morning the thief has the dead man's name, badge and job. Nobody on screen stops to ask whether this could hold, and the show is built on the understanding that nobody should. David Schickler co-created the series with Jonathan Tropper, and that willingness to run with a premise rather than defend it is the most visible thing the pair brought to it.
He came to it from the page. The New Yorker published his short story The Smoker in 2000, after years of teaching English and drama and collecting rejections. A linked collection set in a single New York block of flats, Kissing in Manhattan, followed in 2001, and the novel Sweet and Vicious in 2004. He wrote scripts for studios that were never produced. Then came Banshee, made with Tropper for the American channel Cinemax, which ran 38 episodes over four seasons to 2016. The year it began he also published a memoir, The Dark Path (2013), about a young man caught between the priesthood and desire, which tells you where the show's mix of sex and guilt was coming from.
What he carries over from fiction is an ear for a sharp line and a fondness for people remaking themselves, which is what nearly everyone in Banshee is doing. What he brings from pulp he has stated plainly: "I like high-stakes situations where people's bodies, hearts and futures are in dire jeopardy." We enjoyed the pilot more than we expected to, because Greg Yaitanes stages it fast and clean and the script never once apologises for what it is asking us to swallow. We enjoyed some of what followed rather less, because the plotting keeps having to invent reasons for the next fight, and the early seasons reach for shock where a quieter scene would have done the work. Antony Starr holds the thing together when the writing does not.
His screen career is one show, and it is a show that leaned on its director and its lead. Whether the nerve and the ear survive without Tropper and Yaitanes is a question with no evidence either way yet. On what there is, he writes stories that move and has not yet shown he can make one stand up without a body on the floor.
Biography
David Schickler is an American writer and author. He is the co-creator, with Jonathan Tropper, of the Cinemax series Banshee (2013–2016), on which he also served as writer and executive producer.
Schickler is the author of the short story collection Kissing in Manhattan (2001) and the novel Sweet and Vicious (2004). His memoir The Dark Path was published in 2013. His short story "The Smoker" won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker. He graduated from McQuaid Jesuit High School, Georgetown University and Columbia University.
