Watching a TV show about Hannibal Lecter in the year of our lord 2015 brings to mind one of the good doctors most deliciously deadly double entendres: Im having an old friend for dinner. Sure, we had some fun together once. . .but isnt it past time for a last supper? Created by novelist Thomas Harris, the iconic psychiatrist/gourmand/cannibals screen history has had its highs (Michael Manns understated, underrated Manhunter; Jonathan Demmes grim, gray Oscar-winning classic The Silence of the Lambs) and its lows (Ridley Scotts inedible sequel Hannibal; Brett Ratners empty-calorie prequel Red Dragon). Meanwhile, the role has become so synonymous with Anthony Hopkins that seeing actor Mads Mikkelsen suit up and chow down can feel something like sacrilege. Lecters maxim may be Eat the rude, but even hed likely forgive viewers for turning down another helping.
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So heres some advice: Forget the past, sit down and be prepared to clean your plate. Hannibal returns for its third season tonight at the tail end of NBCs primetime lineup a fact that, if youve seen at least five minutes of virtually any of its baroque, bloody-as-hell episodes, is almost as shocking as anything thats happened on the series. But regardless of whether this culinarily perverse, chops-licking procedural had appeared on a network or a premium cable channel, the series would still feel like an absolutely singular achievement. It is a magnificently macabre drama that looks and feels like absolutely nothing else on TV.
Helmed by former Star Trek: Voyager and Pushing Daisies writer/producer Bryan Fuller, the show is a jaw-drop of a journey into the strange minds of two characters: FBI profiler Will Graham (a twitchy and vulnerable Hugh Dancy), whose unique suite of spectrum disorders enables him get inside the heads of the most brutal psychopaths; and his best friend/nemesis Hannibal Lecter, played by Mikkelsen as an aloof demigod with perfect manners and a killer wardrobe.
Hannibals main victim: realism itself. Little of the series stylishly surreal look and operatic tone resembles the sad, squalid cruelty of real-world serial killers. But Fuller sacrifices verisimilitude on the altar of visuals for good reason. Horror uses violence to give voice to emotional extremes that the vocabulary of every day life cant articulate think The Shinings murderous ghosts embodying Jack Torrances abusive alcoholic rage, or Game of Thrones depicting warfares cyclical slaughter with a literal avalanche of corpses rising up to kill again. This revisionist look at Lecters grand-guignol-gourmet misadventures, however, has a tendency to Ginsu-cut out the metaphorical middlemen. The near-constant dream sequences and hallucinations of a black stag-antlered demon transform the characters fears into tenebrous terrors. People dont just have visions that weave in and out of the narrative here; they witness metaphysical fountains of blood that threaten to drown out the world in a crimson tide. And then they head to the kitchen.
The shows living, breathing monsters are no less fond of symbolism. Here, serial killers arent just murderers but sculptors, painters, performance artists and, of course, cooks with the human body as a canvas of choice. Victims are buried alive in a mushroom garden so that the fungal growths can connect them in a world that keeps us apart, or theyre arranged in a massive round color-wheel tableau that, seen from a distance, resembles a giant eye. (The better to stare at a god that isnt there, my dear.) Crimes are staged like exhibits in a museum: A judge is blinded to represent the justice his courtroom couldnt provide; a forensics investigator is systematically dissected. Deranged creative types transmit their unspeakable thoughts, and investigators analyze them its the dialogue between a horror filmmaker and a film critic by another name.
Even when the show doubles as a workplace drama (for a show with such expressionist ways of depicting evil, its portrayals of adult friendships are pleasantly understated), it still thrives on toxic dynamics. Think about your social circles, IRL or online: Chances are good that the most unpleasant people you know didnt get that way on their own. Someones egging them on, bringing out the worst in them. In its own cranked-to-11 way, thats Will and Hannibal: Lecter pushes his friend to the brink of murder and madness; Graham inflates his cohorts already god-sized ego and drives him to commit ever more grandiose atrocities. Its not quite the same as your friend who became insufferable the moment some asshole started faving all their cattiest tweets but its close. Then the shows imagery weaponizes those connections into art-murder spectacles that end lives and fever-dream fantasy sequences that sever the series ties to reality. Welcome to Hannibals nightmare.
This is a show that leaves you thinking that maybe the world is a little bit worse for its presence a mark of all great horror. And whether youre a fan of the genre or a practitioner, youve got to be like Will Graham voluntarily connecting with the worst humanity has to offer. You must be willing to turn to the work and say just fuck me up. In this series, that thrillingly self-destructive impulse is invited and then rewarded a hundredfold with some of the most gorgeous visuals of murder and cooking youve ever seen. When you binge on Hannibal, Hannibal binges back. Bon apptit.