By ANDY GILCHRIST
Staff Writer
America is obsessed with serial killers. Throughout history, we have been shocked and horrified by the acts they commit, but simply can’t look away when we hear about them. They may be infamous, but they’re still celebrities. Creatures like Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, John Wayne Gacy, and David Berkowitz have been elevated to symbolic status for their horrific crimes and their eventual downfalls. Ultimately, there is a sense of comfort in knowing that these monsters have been captured and satisfaction in knowing that they will be punished for their deeds.
Stories of such beasts and the police who hunt them have been prevalent and popular in the media for decades. For its new series Hannibal, NBC has gone back to the well and back to basics to tell the story of pop culture’s most fascinating serial killer: Hannibal Lector. In a year that has already seen the debut of serial killer shows The Following and Bates Motel, Hannibal separates itself by its beautifully twisted direction and cinematography and its superior on-screen performances. Despite, or perhaps because of, its often extreme violence, this new iteration of the Hannibal Lector story more than holds its own against other television shows and more importantly, it serves as a worthy successor to the books and films these characters are best known for.
Based on the novel Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris, Hannibal serves as a prequel to the Lector saga, but updates the story to the present day. Criminal profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is brought out of early retirement by Jack Crawford (Lawrence Fishburne), head of behavior sciences at the FBI. Will has a bizarre gift to empathize with every person, even murderers. He can analyze a crime scene and know the motivations of the killer, recreating the crime in his head in brutal detail. But this ability is also a curse, for no one could possibly imagine what happens in his mind, the extreme levels of fear and horror his imagination brings him on a daily basis.
Crawford needs someone to keep Will in check, someone to make sure he doesn’t go off the deep end. Enter Hannibal Lector (Mads Mikkelsen), respected psychiatrist and secretly the most dangerous psychopath of them all. Lector agrees to psychoanalyze Will and follow him a bit into the field, where he immediately begins to manipulate all the pieces on the board. It is inevitable that Will and Lector will clash and that eventually only one will be left standing, but until then, their collaborations and confrontations as they hunt down lesser villains will make for thrilling television.
If all you know of Hannibal Lector is the classic 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs, you won’t even recognize this version. We’re years away from Clarice Starling entering the FBI academy, let alone hunting down Buffalo Bill, so don’t expect to see her anywhere. Instead, we have Will Graham, a man on the edge who’s just a step away from becoming just crazy as those he hunts. Dancy plays him to almost schizophrenic perfection, a man who clearly wants to help those in need, but is constantly terrified of what this will do to him. Mikkelsen, meanwhile, is a much different Lector than Anthony Hopkins, yet is just as evil. Even though the audience knows he is the worst killer of them all, the show only hints at it rather than stating it outright. Lector is never seen killing anyone, but is seen preparing and eating several meat-filled dishes, one in particular right after another body is discovered.
The direction and cinematography of this very violent series also puts it above the rest. While many crime shows simply show blood being spilled without any substance behind it, Hannibal slows things down and takes a different approach. There is an almost artful way that violence is shown, which can be attributed to the depth of madness in the show’s villains. While Hannibal has more violence than almost anything else on TV, which makes it often difficult to watch, the way it is presented is so striking that you often can’t take your eyes off the screen, no matter how badly you want to.
But the most incredible piece of the show is the inside of Graham’s mind. At a crime scene, flashes of light move across his eye line as he removes other police officers and CSIs, then the corpses, and recreates the crime in all its gory detail. He watches as the victims are struck down and die slowly, narrating it to anyone who is listening back in the real world. Graham’s mind is incredibly perceptive and advanced and seeing inside it is truly unlike anything ever seen on television.
NBC’s newest series Hannibal is the latest in a long line of serial killer-centric shows, but proves itself better than most due to its incredible talent and performances in front of and behind the camera. Though the books and films have already told us how the story will end, getting there will make for one of the most exciting and captivating rides on network television.
