If you haven't yet, go find and watch the pilot. It hooked me within about five minutes, and I think I fell in love somewhere around the half hour mark. The writing is stellar in every way possible: the dialogue is tight and memorable, the pacing is solid, and while it takes a little while into the first season to get to Hannibal's long term story arc, it is very much worth the wait. But where the show really shines is in its artistic direction and its provocative use of visual imagery. Every shot of Hannibal's food is terrifyingly beautiful, of course, and every episode the crime scenes get more twisted and more stunning, but the best visual imagery comes from the main character's hallucinated animal companion: a feathered stag, which appears in pretty much every episode. There's a lot to praise about that particular image, from how they manage to keep the imagery surrounding it primal and subconscious, to how much mileage they get out of one image. When the stag was first introduced to the audience, it was an easy symbol of purity and sensitivity, but as the show progressed, it's become clear the writers saw an alarming amount of complexity in that animal, and they've been slowly unveiling that complexity over the past two seasons. I could keep going, but this introduction is already super long, so basically, every facet of Hannibal's plot, characters and imagery has clearly been fussed over and carefully considered to an extent I've rarely seen in television, and right now, it's in a class of its own.
"I assure you, nothing here is vegetarian"
For all but the three people I know who watch Hannibal, here's a little context: the show starts as a prequel to Thomas Harris' Hannibal trilogy, which was Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, revolving around psychiatrist/America's favorite cannibal, Hannibal Lecter (played by the creepiest man alive, Mads Mikkelsen). The first few seasons are essentially based on one paragraph from the first chapter of Red Dragon, which explains how Hannibal once consulted for the FBI and worked with a special agent named Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). Will has a unique ability to "read" crime scenes, and to understand empathetically how and why serial killers kill. However in order to do so, he has to put himself in the killer's shoes and relive their murders. The more he does this, the further from sanity Will gets, so naturally Will turns to his good friend and psychologist Hannibal for help. Together, the two of them explore the boundaries of human morality, as Will tries to remain good in the face of pure evil and Hannibal tries to hide his evil under the guise of pure goodness.
As bromances go, it's a pretty weird one
Without getting into spoilers, the show's plot seems to have been thought out very carefully, and so it has never ceased to be inventive and surprising. But it's honestly not the most impressive part of the show's writing: the most impressive thing is Fuller's use of dramatic irony, and his ability to imbue every line with layer upon layer of subtext. Some of the best examples are Hannibal's description of his own food (there's pretty much at least one an episode, but my personal favorite is the time when, after being asked what kind of fish he was serving, Hannibal responded, "He was a flounder."), but there are so many other great moments. Mikkelsen's Hannibal clearly gets off on foreshadowing his own evilness in everyday conversation, which leads him into a "prolonged flirtation with the FBI," as one character called it. Every murder scene Hannibal sees, he laces his protestations of disgust with quiet admiration. Every time someone accuses him of immorality, he leans into it and dismisses it as a joke rather than actually deny it. While this irony has a lot of advantages, including the weird black comedy it adds to so many episodes, I think the reason I love it as much as I do is what it does to Hannibal as a character. For starters, it perfectly jives with the power fetish that is the root of his sociopathy, but it also turns him into this larger than life figure within the show's mythology. Each of his speeches seems to be prepared with a super human amount of foresight, as he mocks the FBI to their faces and also manipulates them to perfection. He exerts as much force over those around him as a composer does over an orchestra, and yet most people never quite see that he's doing it (and those who do never fare well). This is an incredibly complicated and subtle characterization, and when you consider that it's been done almost exclusively through ironic subtext and double entendre, it might be the most impressive piece of characterization I've seen since Walter White.
Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. I ate his liver with some kidney beans and a nice chianti.
But as awesome as I think Bryan Fuller is as a writer, the best part of each episode is invariably a Will Graham hallucination. As Hannibal exposes Will to the darkest parts of the human psyche, Will starts to crack under the pressure, in the most visual beautiful way possible: he becomes haunted by an imaginary stag, which follows him wherever he goes and shows up whenever he just can't take it anymore. Initially, it was a token of his own faltering innocence, and a painful reminder of the innocent victims he imagines killing week in and week out. However, as the show progresses and Will succumbs to Hannibal's dark influence, the stag slowly becomes corrupted, and Will begins to see it less as a sensitive beast and more as any other animal: big, powerful and capable of a lot of cruelty. As we sit near the end of the second season, Will's innocence is largely gone, and so is his pet stag's. I really like that imagery, but I think what catapults it from good to amazing is that this imagery is never discussed by anyone on the show. Ever. It exists as part of Will's internal monologue, and I doubt even he has the words to tackle this imagery; he's just living with it. It would have been really easy to have Hannibal and Will sit down and unpack this imagery in one of their sessions, but they never do. That would have cheapened it, I think: by keeping it purely visual and keeping it in Will's subconscious, the stag imagery retains all of its psychological power over Will, and over us. Leaving it unexplained makes it so much more affecting and creepy, and has often led to me loudly yelling "WHAT?!" at my computer in a lot of inappropriate places. I have a lot of respect for Hannibal for maintaining this effect, for not pandering to its audience by overexplaining but requiring its audience's engagement in the show's themes. It's an incredibly bold decision for a show so on the edge of being cancelled, but I'm really glad they do it: it allows the show's visual imagery to shine, and creates a haunting and surreal effect unlike anything I've seen on network television before.
Like I said, surrealism
The visual imagery and the subtle dialogue are definitely my favorite parts of Hannibal, but there are a lot of other things that make this show great and unique. It's emphasis on the psychology of murder over its details make it a fresh take on the CSI-esque murder investigation genre. The acting is consistently amazing, not just from the two leads but also from Lawrence Fishburne (who has a really complicated role as a FBI supervisor Jack Crawford, but shines in it), the various guest actors who've shown up as serial killers (none better than Eddie Izzard) and from the recurring lab technicians, or as I like to call them, Bert, Ernie and Beverly Katz. And all of the little things, from the increasingly interesting murders of the week to the most distressingly delicious food porn to even the soundtrack: it's all arranged to perfection. It's really just a tremendous show, the best on television, and everyone needs to start watching it. Now.
Like really, go! It's worth it.
[p.s., thanks to Alessio for talking through visual imagery with me, and to Jake for knowing more about Thomas Harris than me, and for showing me Hannibal in the first place]
[p.p.s., the food designer for Hannibal has a blog where she talks about all the show's food. It's the weirdest, coolest food porn site you'll ever read. It's here: http://janicepoonart.blogspot.com/]
[p.p.s., I've spent way too much time the past few days just watching this:
]
Like really, go! It's worth it.
[p.s., thanks to Alessio for talking through visual imagery with me, and to Jake for knowing more about Thomas Harris than me, and for showing me Hannibal in the first place]
[p.p.s., I've spent way too much time the past few days just watching this:
]
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