Seven Things You’ll Love About Hannibal

Everyone has watched Game of Thrones and most people have watched Breaking Bad, but there’s one show that’s slipped under the radar this year. As the season draws to a close, I think we need to spend some time talking about Hannibal.

A step away from creator Bryan Fuller’s typical dark-whimsy (Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me), the reboot-slash-retcon places us in a pre-Red Dragon universe as criminal profiler/empath Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is dragged reluctantly into the real world to help catch serial killers. His partner and friend is forensic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). Hilarity ensues.

Well, not really. Or at all. This version of Hannibal is almost devoid of anything camp or humorous, playing harsh realities so straight it’s occasionally hard to handle. Yet, it’s so addictive and unforgettable that it beats out almost all television released this year. Here are the seven reasons why…

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1. Every single episode is like Silence Of The Lambs

Imagine a world where excellent dramatic performances were not limited to genre pieces and HBO. Hannibal is a step in that direction, delivering a convincingly tense dramatic thriller every episode. It’s well-paced, beautifully shot, and a great show from the beginning, no grace period required. If you don’t like the first episode, you won’t like the series. But once you’re hooked, you’re hooked like a corpse on deer antlers.

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2. The food

Oh my god, the food. In a show about a cannibal serial killer and his unwitting accomplices, you’d expect one or two references to characters eating human flesh, but every episode is a smorgasbord of (literally) head-to-tail dining, courtesy of committed gourmand Hannibal and his rotating cast of dinner guests.

Developed under the advisement of celebrity chef José Andrés, the food itself is styled and presented by Janice Poon, who hosts a blog called ‘Feeding Hannibal’ dedicated to chronicling each episode’s food, including a series of recipes designed to emulate Hannibal’s meals. There’s no suggestion that you should substitute lamb entrails with human ones, but really, it’s just a given. The show’s finest feature is its ability to blur the lines between the beautiful and the grotesque. The food is a great example of this: mouth watering and stomach churning, simultaneously.

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3. The crime

When I first started watching Hannibal, I was surprised by the ever present subscript “Viewer Discretion Advised”. I’ve watched every episode of SVU, even those without Stabler. I’m a hardened crime fiction adorer.

Yeah, I was wrong.

First off, the murders are intense; each episode is dedicated to a different serial killer and mode of death that manage to make your skin crawl in different ways. Really though, discretion is advised because almost every crime occurs in moral grey area. From children killing to save themselves, prisoners manipulated into serial killers by psychiatrists, and tumor-suffering ‘angels’, every crime will make you debate who’s actually to blame.

Nothing occurs in isolation. Without background and depth, the crimes would be hollow and meaningless (as Todd VanDerWerff points out in this excellent piece about The Following). By delving into the killer’s psyche, we are forced to understand their motivations; while unsettling, it’s what  gives the show its power.

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4. The cast

Okay, I could talk about every member of the cast in depth and with great fervour, but you’d get bored very quickly, so I’ll settle for listing them for your excitement.

Featuring Laurence Fishburne, Eddie Izzard, Gillian Anderson, Caroline Dhavernas and Anna ‘My Girl‘ Chlumsky, it’s less a game of familiar faces and more one of broken archetypes: none of these actors are playing to traditional form, but seem comfortable nonetheless, benefited by credible writing and better direction.

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5. Hugh Dancy as ‘Will Graham’

‘Gifted’ with near-photographic memory and “pure empathy”, Will Graham is a ‘special agent’ and the shows main crim-catcher. The softly spoken criminal profiler is sweet — “a stray rescuing strays” — but broken by what he has to do to save lives. He drives the show more than anything else, and it’s glorious.

Hugh Dancy does a lot to shine as Will Graham. Competing with Hannibal as a character alone would be challenging, even without Mads Mikkelsen’s empowered performance. Somehow, by drifting between meek and mad, he creates a stable narrative voice, ignoring run of the mill ‘is it a dream? is it real?’ insanity for ‘it’s real, and goddamn, it’s terrifying’.

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6. Mads Mikkelsen as ‘Hannibal Lecter’

Obviously, the entire Hannibal Lecter series is nothing without it’s titular character. Anthony Hopkins’ performances in Silence Of The Lambs and Red Dragon is rightly lauded and unforgettable. But here, there’s something different.

Hannibal is not yet the creepy inmate-cum-advisor; instead, he’s a respected psychiatrist, mentoring some of the nation’s finest profilers. Played by Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, the character is convincingly written and performed. Some have even said Mikkelsen’s performance outranks that of Hopkins, and for pure villainous consistency, it does. Hopkins had just fifteen minutes of screen-time in Silence Of The Lambs, while Mikkelsen is in every episode of Hannibal as a central character. Even as your alarm bells ring when he’s alone with any other character, you understand why they trust him. I mean, he’s only there to help.

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7. It’s been renewed

Hannibal finished in the US last week, and will end in Australia in three weeks when Channel 7 catches up. There’s nothing to worry about, though; earlier this month, NBC in the US renewed our new favorite crime show for a second season.

Crime TV of this nature often struggles to capture the energy of its first season in the second (see: The Killing, Wallander, Broadchurch), but the team is strong, and hopefully the show will remain so, too. Hannibal stands out from the crowd by being beautiful and confronting, pushing beyond past incarnations of its universe while still being aware and referential. It acknowledges death and violence, occasionally to the point of gore, but never without reason. So go watch it; you won’t be disappointed (maybe just a bit hungry).

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The final episode of Season One aired overseas last week, but there are three more episodes yet to air locally. See it on Seven on Wednesdays at 10:30pm and catch-up on some older episodes on Plus7.

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Alex Watts is a Wee Waa born writer, musician and marketer living in Sydney, Australia. You can find him on twitter as @solwat.