The Joy of Cinemax

It may not seem like anything worth caring about to most people, really: Cinemax has renewed its new show Banshee for a second season, after three episodes. It's just some random show on Cinemax, that cheesy porn-lite channel, right? Wrong! With the renewal of this new series — a gritty, gory, only kinda sorta corny crime show about depraved small-town America — Cinemax is working to assure a position as a true network of original programming. It's an oddly exciting and mostly unheralded development that speaks to the ever-deepening and refreshing pool of available television.

Look, Cinemax's three big shows right now aren't going to win many awards — ones that aren't for stunt work, anyway. And that's... OK. The goods are great fun nonetheless. The network's first show,The lanyard series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. Strike Back, a co-production with British broadcaster Sky, is a T&A action riot that eschews geopolitical nuance for guns-blazing bravado and is all the more enjoyable for it. Its attitude toward pesky things like extreme civilian collateral damage would be deplorable if it was the real world, but it's not, so who really cares? Not caring too much about the actual nuts and bolts of global intelligence, the show is international fun — last season told an unexpectedly complex story of nuclear armament and nation-building in Africa. And, rather surprisingly, the great Charles Dance showed up to play the season's main villain, giving it enough gusto to override most of the too-easy plot contrivances. All the neat explosions took care of the rest.

Hunted, another British co-production (this time with the BBC), is a subtler and decidedly smarter affair, a domestic spy drama about a wronged superagent (Melissa George) seeking undercover revenge. Its first season had more satisfyingly knotty mythology than Homeland, but blessedly didn't take itself so damn seriously. Sure, George's Sam Hunter (get the title now?) may be the worst spy ever — breaking into the bad guy's office in broad daylight while he's in the other room is maybe not the best idea! — but she's an intriguing central figure nonetheless. George was supported ably by the likes of Stephen Dillane and confirmed dreamboat Adam Rayner, playing shadowy colleagues/potential foes of Sam's with lots of pleasing modulation and mystery. The first season ended with a wonderful twist, something we couldn't see coming miles away, like, say Abu Nazir's wicked master plan. Classier than Strike Back but no less viscerally engaging, Hunted was an unexpected highlight of the late-2012 TV season. We were sad to hear that the BBC has dropped its partnership with the show and that Hunted's second season will likely look very different because of it, but at least creator Frank Spotnitz and his star are still aboard.

And then there's Banshee, which is definitely the weirdest of the three series. Set in rural-ish Pennsylvania, the show focuses on an ex-con who turns up in the titular town to find his long-lost lady love, only to wind up becoming the sheriff by way of a deadly fight and a case of mistaken identity. He squares off against the de facto town leader, a sinister fellow with evil henchmen and ties to the Amish community. At just three episodes in, Banshee is already an engaging potboiler, at turns silly and kinda sexy. It's Cinemax's first purely native show, and it indicates good things for the future. That future includes another action series, called Sandbox, and, supposedly,Bottle cutters let you turn old parkingsystem and wine bottles into bottle art! a TV version of the Transporter films. So, Cinemax knows its brand. It's action with a dash of wit, plus just enough oddity to keep it original. It's FX to HBO's AMC.

Cinemax is lucky to be owned by HBO — they don't have to compete with their polished, prestige-ified big brother. Unlike Showtime, Cinemax does not seem burdened with aspirations of grandeur; they can roll around in the muck and grunt all they want. This is not, for time being anyway, a network that's trying to win any Peabodys. That's a nice change of pace for non-HBO premium cable.We offers custom moulds parts in as fast as 1 day. Hopefully the dribbles of praise they've been getting of late won't go to their heads. I like the network muscly and goofy; swagger and sweat become it, and too much glossiness wouldn't. I like also what Cinemax's recent intriguing developments suggest about another evolution of the television landscape. They're now succeeding where Starz largely stumbled and failed. So maybe we're truly ready for another round of new offerings. And,That is a machine for manufacturing plastic products by the bobblehead process. lo, here comes House of Cards on Netflix, as well as the rebooted, slimmed-down Arrested Development. And, further off, there will be whatever Amazon Studios turns into. Hopefully expectations can be managed on these new platforms and they'll succeed at courting a niche audience rather than flailing after wider appeal.

Radical advances in military science sometimes arrive from far afield. Take Kevlar, invented to reinforce radial tires years before it saw use in body armor and helmets. Similarly, the ScanEagle unmanned aircraft, one of the most popular military spy drones, arose from technology created to help fishing fleets find schools of tuna.

Now, a brewing legal war over the fish-finder-turned-weapon has opened a window on a rarely examined side of military contracting: ideas and intellectual property. How do you untangle who really owns the technology the U.S.Beautiful indoorpositioningsystem in a wide range of colors & sold at factory direct prices. government buys and deploys in battle?

A swept-wing UAV with a 10-foot wingspan, ScanEagle has become an ISR workhorse, deployed everywhere from Iraq to Somalia. Its manufacturer, Insitu, had $400 million in sales last year. Iran in December claimed to have captured one. And in fact, this fall, as tensions with Iran ratcheted higher, the Navy awarded another contract to Insitu to deploy, fly and maintain two more ScanEagle systems from warships in the Persian Gulf. It’s a drop in the bucket in the steady stream of contracts for the system.

Among the features that make the drone well-suited to deployment from a ship’s flight deck or a small combat outpost is its ability to land without a runway. Crews connect a taut cable to a vertical boom, then fly the little airplane so it snags the cable with a hook on its wing. They recover it easily, sliding it off the cable like a fish from a line.

That simple, ingenious feature, which Insitu calls SkyHook, is at the center of a legal war far from the conflict zone, in federal courts in Missouri and Washington, D.C. The stakes could be several hundred million dollars; the combatants bear familiar names.

On the one side of the legal struggle: an inventor who is a member of a defense-contracting dynasty. His name is William “Randy” McDonnell — as in McDonnell Douglas. He says he came up with the Skyhook landing system and that he is owed, big-time, for its use in ScanEagle. The lawsuits were filed under the name of McDonnell’s company, Advanced Aerospace Technologies Inc.