Stuff You Should Be Watching: Hannibal

Well… actually I give this one a big ol’ “If this is your thing” because this is REALLY not everyone’s thing.

BUT by popular demand, people asked for a Hannibal post, and a Hannibal post you shall have.  Who’s hungry?

Take Pushing Daises.  Turn the color saturation up, and the exposure down, and make the food about five magnitudes more classy but also made of people, and you get Hannibal.  It’s Bryan Fuller’s (show runner for Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, both cancelled before their time) reimagining of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal series (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Hannibal Rising).

It’s not an adaptation, really, and more of “inspired by” (in the credits it’s “based on the characters created by Thomas Harris”).  You have the characters of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter and Jack Crawford and others mentioned almost in passing and Fuller reimagined these guys together, before Hannibal is caught and everyone knows who Hannibal the Cannibal is.

One of the real delights of the show (and I’m stealing from Cleolinda Jones here), is that the audience has been shown the bomb.  We know, through cultural osmosis, who and what Hannibal Lecter is.  He’s a killer.  He eats PEOPLE.  He’s a bad bad person!  So when he shows up on screen, delicately eating a sauteed kidney, the audience is already on edge.  There’s the bomb.  When is it going to go off?  When will the people realize they’re in a show called Hannibal?  WHEN WILL THEY REALIZE IT FUCKING RHYMES.

One of the really interesting things Fuller does is he takes threads from various books and reweaves them.  We’ve had bits a pieces that are inspired by Silence of the Lambs.  We’ve done a little bit from Red Dragon (though the bulk of the Red Dragon storyline is coming up in season 3, CANNOT WAIT).  We’ve had lines and references from Hannibal.  Even a bit from (god help us) Hannibal Rising (THAT BOOK WAS NOT GOOD.  Not even Harris thinks so).  It’s fascinating how Fuller deconstructs and reconstructs to give us something new and fascinating.

Every part of this show is so well done, but let’s start with the cast.  Mads Mikkelsen, known to many American audiences as Le Chiffre, from Casino Royale, is an amazing Danish actor and plays Hannibal.  He’s a BIG dude, and former ballet dancer, and it shows in how he moves and how he fights.  He’s also ever so elegant and refined in his tailored plaid suits and ties and spotless apron while he cooks (which, when you see Mads on panels or in the wild, he usually looks like a vaguely drunk college student).  He manages the balance between projecting “you can trust me” to the other characters while being subtly threatening to the camera- he’s the king of micro-expressions and you can see the moments where he’s thinking, “I have a recipe in my box that’s just for you.”

Hugh Dancy is Will Graham- an FBI profiler who has what is described as “pure empathy.” He can, from examining the evidence, put himself in the mind of a killer and figure out what they do and why.  (Yes, I am aware that “pure empathy” is not a thing- the show runners are too, but that’s the construct within the books and the show, so we go with it).

All of this takes a toll, though, and he’s sent to Hannibal Lecter, MD, as a patient, and that goes exactly as well as you might think.  Will also collects stray dogs, so you know he’s a good guy (and Bryan Fuller has promised us that no dogs will die in the show.  One has, quietly off screen because her actor-dog died, but he will not write into the script that someone killed a dog, much to the relief of Fannibals everywhere).  Hugh is strong and vulnerable and you just want to give him a blankie and a mug of cocoa.

When casting, Fuller took a book full of a bunch of a white dudes and made a bunch of them not white and not dudes.  Lawrence FIshburne plays Jack Crawford, the head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit at the FBI.  Alan Bloom becomes Alana Bloom, played by Wonderfalls‘ Caroline Dharvenas (who is incandescent).  Freddie Lounds, an “investigative” “journalist” is now Fredericka Lounds.  Beverly Katz, one of the FBI lab techs, is played by Hettienne Park, a Korean-American actress.  Other actors involved include Gillian Anderson (!), Aaron Abrams, Scott Thompson, Kacey Ruhl, Raul Esparza, Katherine Isabelle, and coming on board in season 3, RICHARD ARMITAGE AND RUTINA WESLEY (I honestly don’t know who I am more excited for out of those two, and you all know how pure and true my love for Mr. Armitage is.)

Really fine actors can elevate a work; really fine actors given art direction to steer the atmosphere are so lucky.  Hannibal’s office (as Cleolinda calls it, The Best Office Ever), for example has art, color, furnishings that speak of a man of refined tastes but with an edge to him.  His dining room has pots of herbs growing along one wall plus a basically pornographic print of Leda and the Swan, his kitchen is a glorious space to work with just a hint of a doctor’s surgical suite.  Will’s home is small and comfortably cluttered and is the home of a man who doesn’t feel quite safe in his skin.

And you can’t have a show about Hannibal Lecter, gourmand, without talking about the food.  I mean, yeah, the food is pretty people (even the beer) (that hasn’t been confirmed, but… the beer is people) but it’s SO PRETTY.  Janice Poon is the food stylist, and it’s her job to take the food as described in the script, work with the chef who comes up with a more concrete plan, and then bring the food to the set.  As many copies are as needed for shooting a scene, which can be a lot.  She has a blog, Feeding Hannibal, that describes her process for every episode, and rumor has it there will be a cookbook coming out in the near future.  (Seriously there was a osso buco that was made from leg of serial killer in the second season that I still drool over.)

Look, don’t get me wrong.  The show is SUPER dark.  It’s broken up by occasional cannibal puns and random facts about noisy bee ejaculate and questions like “Is your social worker in that horse?”, but the show is about a serial killer who gaslighting a guy who he wants to be his best friend while going on occasional killing sprees because he’s lonely and wants to host a dinner party.

It’s a dark show.  There’s a lot of “Well, that was a thing I saw on network TV, and the NBC Standards and Practices department has been busy.”  (For example in the same shot: wings made out of flawed flesh to turn a corpse into an angel: Okay.  Too much butt crack: Not okay.  CGI-ing blood over said butt crack: Acceptable solution.)

Because of the darkness, the fandom (termed “Fannibals” by Bryan Fuller) is determinedly light.  We put flower crowns on everyone.  There’s fanfic about Will Graham having a nice day where nothing he eats is people and everything is sunny and wonderful.  We have fun, and Fuller manages the difficult trick of engaging and subtly steering the fandom towards positivity without doing what a lot of creators do, which is treating the fandom like they’re a little bit nuts.  No one is as big a fan of the show as Fuller is, and he’s game for a lot of things.  He wore the flower crown that was given to him at San Diego Comic Con in 2013, then took it to the set and had all the principals have their pictures taken with it until they wore it out and had to make a new one.  (Lawrence Fishburne.  Flower crown.  It’s glorious.) He loves that people love his show, and it’s one of the most positive fandoms  I’ve been involved with.

Season 1 and 2 can be seen on iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon.  DVDs are also available, and season 3 premieres on June 4th on NBC.