Gone Too Soon: Hannibal, the original kitchen nightmare.
The gorgeous, grotesque reimagining of cinema’s most notorious killer
After The Silence Of The lambs
changed the profile of fava beans forever, it seemed unthinkable that anyone other than Anthony Hopkins could play Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter. thomas Harris’ books had suggested a monster — Hopkins gave him life.
His chemistry with Jodie foster’s trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling had the hypnotic effect of a snake with its struggling prey. But for Lecter’s reimagining as Mads Mikkelsen in NBC’S hannibal, showrunner Bryan fuller had a very different idea: what would it be like to solve murders, side by side with Lecter. to have access to that intellect before his dreadful secrets were revealed? And how could you live with yourself after becoming seduced and drawn, as FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) eventually is, down into the world of a manipulative psychopath?
fuller served us a clever, brilliant, and frequently batshit reinvention which neatly brought together the plots of Red Dragon;
a wafer-thin precursor concerning the Minnesota Shrike killer; and even Harris’ ghastly follow-up novel, also called Hannibal, with an original moment involving a pig that out-disgustinged anything in that book.
Mikkelsen and Dancy had previously crossed swords in 2004’s King Arthur, but their chemistry in the series was a giddy delight that topped even Lecter’s sinister charms. Dancy, so cherubic that he had literally played Prince Charming (in ella enchanted), was inspired casting as Graham, the fbi’s champion profiler whose fascination and friendship with Lecter lent the first series its structure: that of a “murder of the week” procedural with the unsettling air of a buddy comedy where one of the buddies is a serial killer. As for Mikkelsen’s Lecter, his face like a high-calibre gravestone, he was an austere, uncertain thing; with the soothing, hypnotic dread of Count Dracula and flamboyantly baroque mannerisms to match.
hannibal picked and chose from tv’s gene pool: as elementary did with Lucy Liu’s John Watson, it gave us gender and raceswapping casting for Dr Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), crime blogger freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki), reba Mclane (rutina Wesley) and FBI boss Jack Crawford (Lawrence fishburne). even the series ending paid tribute to Holmes and Moriarty’s ‘final
problem’. And, like Dexter, it focused on serial killers gliding under the surface of everyday life, and the people who aid and abet them — especially Gillian Anderson’s glittering therapist, Bedelia Du Maurier, replacing Starling as Lecter’s accomplice through Italy.
The genius of Fuller’s execution — demonstrtated so beautifully on Pushing Daisies and, briefly, Dead Like Me — was to tease Graham and Lecter’s friendship out until what had begun feeling like internet fan fiction became a horrific game of cat and mouse. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m psychoanalysed,” Graham deadpans at the series’ start, yet this warning would later apply almost as closely to him as to Lecter.
Hannibal’s reveal as the Chesapeake Ripper at the end of Season 2 could have wrapped up the series altogether, but by then Graham’s empathy had taken him from ruffled young profiler to someone utterly entangled. Did Lecter truly love him, as Du Maurier would later suggest? Perhaps. But only in so far as he could see how he might steer Graham’s mind towards his murderous way of thinking — and while Graham has gone through his fair share of murder by the series end, at heart, he is still a good man.
Hannibal is currently on Netflix UK, meaning it can be streamed at will. Back in 2013 when it started, however, it was the fifth most-pirated show in the world. But unlike the similarly afflicted Game Of Thrones (with a Season 3 average of 1.31 million), Hannibal
didn’t have anywhere near its viewing figures. Executive producer Martha De Laurentiis claimed nearly a third of its audience came from pirated sites. “If a show is stolen, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to fairly compensate a crew and keep a series in production,” she said in 2016, shortly after 50,000 fans had signed a petition calling for the show’s return. Fuller did meet with studios to try to save the show, but complications with Amazon’s streaming rights called a halt to Hannibal. So he moved on, keeping himself busy with American Gods
and (in the development phase) Star Trek: Discovery, much to Hannibal fans’ distress.
The show’s passionate viewers aren’t the only ones hopeful for more of Lecter and Graham’s chemistry, and Fuller’s Grand Guignol sensibility, though. “I know Bryan is still working on some ideas where we can find a new home for this,” Mikkelsen said last year, adding that Fuller had been working to get the rights to The Silence Of The Lambs, so that he could use some of its characters in his own Hannibal universe. “I also have a strong feeling everybody who was involved would gladly pick up the glove again if that happens.”
Hannibal was a grotesque banquet of tragedy, satire and horror that proved more than a match for any of Lecter’s lavish dinner parties, and thanks to its central relationships and some exceptional casting chemistry, it also provided intimate moments à deux.
As Lecter tells Eddie Izzard’s Dr Abel Gideon, shortly before serving him his own leg for supper: “The tragedy is not to die, Abel, but to be wasted.” Whether playing through therapy rooms in America, or outwitting the authorities through Italy, Bryan Fuller’s beautiful, extraordinary, sensational show played to its fullest, to the last, wasting not a drop. A tribute was made to one of the most charismatic villains of our cultural age that provided to be intensely satisfying. Hopkins’ Lecter had seemed unsurpassable, but this show proved even the most exemplary recipes can be improved with a little spice — and some extra protein.