Six Feet Under and True Blood creator Alan Ball has sold another drama series—one that, for the first time in many years, has zero to do with dead things, a lesson that Ball learned the hard way when HBO passed on All Signs Of Death and gently hinted that he might need some counseling. Instead he’s moving on to crime with Banshee, executive-producing a show about an ex-convict master thief who assumes the identity of the sheriff in the fictional town of Banshee, Pennsylvania, where he continues to do master-thief things while also hiding out from the gangsters hunting him down. House director Greg Yaitanes is on board to direct the first episode of the series, which is described as “Walking Tall meets A History Of Violence,” presumably minus the mental images of Joe Don Baker in the sauna that evokes. Or maybe not: The show is being shuttled off to Cinemax, which—as we’ve reported several times now—is attempting to become known as the channel for original action series, as opposed to softcore porn. But this is an Alan Ball show, so you gotta have a little of that.

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