Never has eating people looked so good as on NBC’s Hannibal, but the show had all the reasons to be a failure. When books are made into films, and films made into TV shows, people are usually sceptical. There is precedent to say that adaptations are awful ideas, let alone adaptations of successful adaptations: the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs was faithful to the 1988 Thomas Harris novel and the Oscar count alone suggests the film did pretty well, but its successors – Hannibal, Red Dragon, Hannibal Rising – weren’t received quite as warmly.
The 2015 TV Hannibal had the odds stacked against it for other reasons: the titular lead is a European cannibal played by an actor then relatively unknown to US audiences. It was also troublingly frank for US TV: homoerotic, bloody and not above showing some skin – the showrunner Bryan Fuller has talked about being asked by NBC to add more blood to hide a corpse’s butt crack. It also looked weird on the page: it’s grandly cinematic, the dialogue is wordy. In short the show really shouldn’t have worked.
Hannibal was cancelled by NBC back in June, but it has yet to be picked up by another player – Fuller has only confirmed Netflix and Amazon Prime have turned it down. But regardless of whether it is picked up by someone else, Hannibal is 39 episodes of fantastic television and a comforting example of what greatness can come from adaptations placed in the right hands.
The TV show starts before the stories of The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, beginning with the initial relationship between pop culture’s favourite cannibal and his eventual downfall, FBI special agent Will Graham. Will – grumpy, on the spectrum – has a troubling talent for getting in the minds of serial killers, so Hannibal is assigned as his psychiatrist, an intended vessel for Will’s stress. Thus begins a cat and mouse game spanning three seasons, a predator-prey relationship between two men matched perfectly in their bloodlust and unhealthy mutual codependency.
Mads Mikkelsen’s Lecter doesn’t just better Sir Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal – he devours it. Hopkins’ Lecter teetered on camp madness; Mikkelsen is more subtle, more convincingly insidious: a devil hidden in plaid suiting. After only a few episodes, his proclivity for cannibalism starts becoming the least disturbing thing about him: this Lecter is persuasive, charismatic and likeable. Fuller and his cinematographers uses Mikkelsen’s frankly amazing face to great effect, with chiaroscuro somehow showing both his placid mask and the beast underneath. Even when he’s not doing much – cooking, staring, delivering speeches on God and amorality – he is terrifying. It’s a great performance.
Not all credit goes to Mikkelsen; Hugh Dancy is fantastic as the prickly and damaged Will Graham, and the rest of the cast is remarkably strong too. Most shows would kill for Gillian Anderson, Laurence Fishburne, Richard Armitage, Eddie Izzard and Zachary Quinto to be in a lead cast, let alone a supporting one, but Hannibal has just that.
As any fan of Pushing Daisies will tell you, Bryan Fuller knows how to make a visually striking show. But on Hannibal, Fuller reveals his skill for beautifying the disgusting: he is the figurative lovechild of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, with a knack for an eerie atmosphere. Blood doesn’t splatter in Hannibal: it oozes, often artfully across a snowy field. Maryland and Virginia look brittle in the eternally wintry light. In between the silences and meaningful stares, Brian Reitzell’s soundtrack beats out a rich cacophony of discordant, industrial percussion. All together, it makes for an uneasy night of TV.
But after the unease comes appreciation: the murders are beautiful. A man strung up into a tree with his organs replaced by flowers. Corpses splayed so their shoulder blades become angel wings. A cello neck rammed down a throat so the murderer can pluck the vocal cords.
And the food! Gone are the days of a simple liver and fava beans pairing; your eyes cannot help but eat up Hannibal’s dishes. A sacrificial baby lamb served with fruits of the underworld. Lung and loin bourguignonne. Eddie Izzard’s leg, served to him baked in clay. Of course a show like this has both a food stylist and a chef advisor – Janice Poon and José Andrés respectively – a team coming up with dishes that tightrope a line between macabre and mouth-watering. Poon’s blog Feeding Hannibal is testament of how much effort goes into presentation: ingredients like lotus roots, heritage tomatoes and pomegranates are added to trigger trypophobia; spider orchids and porcupine quills decorate plates and warn of hidden dangers.
Even in the darkest moments, the plot is so tightly constructed and the characters so likeable, you can’t help but feel like you’re having a good time when watching Hannibal. In a montage in season one, Lecter stocks up for one of his fabled dinner parties, deciding what cuts of meat to source from his rolodex of business cards belonging to people who have annoyed him. It’s a scene indicative of the whole series: uniquely, hilariously, deliciously dark.
Hell, the aesthetics on this show do veer into pretentious: all the episodes in season one are named after French meal courses, the second Japanese, and Italian in the third. But like his fussy cannibal, you can’t hold it against Fuller. You will crack an eye open at the murder scenes, you will peer at Lecter’s dinner table to see what’s on it, and part of you will always want Hannibal to get away with it. It’s too damn beautiful not to.
But Fuller could only get away with all this for so long. It was reportedly on NBC’s chopping board since season one; but a passionate fanbase and cliffhanger finales saved it twice. The third time was one too many. When the cancellation was confirmed, the fans – or “fannibals” – voiced their displeasure all over social media at NBC. But how many networks would give three seasons to a psychiatrist cannibal with a penchant for nibbling on limbs and tormented FBI agents?
Maybe it was too weird, maybe it was too gruesome. But it was, all puns intended, bloody good. And so it must go into the hallowed halls of Great TV Before Its Time, with the likes of Arrested Development, Firefly and Fuller’s own Pushing Daisies. Regardless of whether it is resurrected on television, or if it turns up on the big screen, everyone who has enjoyed it – or is about to – owes Bryan Fuller a big thank you. Thanks, Bryan, for being brazen enough to make such a disgusting, beautiful, messed-up show. Yes, this course is over, but who knows what will turn up for dessert.
The finale of Hannibal airs at 9pm EDT in the US on Saturday 29 August and at 10pm GMT on Wednesday 2 September on Sky Living in the UK.
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