mytvhannibal:
Hannibal
Created by: Brian Fuller
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Hugh Dancy, Caroline Dhavernas, Laurence Fishburne, Gillian Anderson
Even in the oeuvre of a visionary like Bryan Fuller, there has never been anything remotely like Hannibal. To call the show, which fleshes out the skeletal structure of Thomas Harris’ series of novels about Hannibal the Cannibal, cinematic would be borderline diminutive. Fuller takes the relationship between the titular psychiatrist-serial killer, played with grand theatrical oomph by Mads Mikkelsen, and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the FBI profiler who is unknowingly tracking him, as the central heart of the series, and their clashes evoke astonishing ideas about masculinity, bestiality, sexuality, and the act of killing. The writing is uniformly fantastic, strewn with succulent allusions to art, cooking, literature, and music, but the pull of this short-lived, unparalleled series is its use of imagery, editing, and music. The series is sensory overload, with the primitive yet sophisticated score echoing the scraping of flesh and drops of blood expanding in and reverberating off a pool of liquid, and the imagery fading and cutting into a glorious barrage of horror and heat. And this is not even getting into the exceptional supporting cast, led by career-best work from the likes of Laurence Fishburne, Gillian Anderson, Caroline Dhavernas, and Scott Thompson.
Hannibal is ten times more rebellious, more genuinely insightful than any show that HBO, FX, or AMC has put out, and yet NBC let it go due to low viewership, having no concept of its growing cult status and its sterling online reputation. The axing of Hannibal will go down as NBC’s Freaks & Geeks and Firefly all rolled into one, a lasting, shaming indictment of NBC’s programming department and the way success is measured by the numbers in primetime television. — Chris Cabin
