Nothing Here is Vegetarian : Why You Should Be Watching NBC's "Hannibal"

This is Will Graham. Will Graham loves dogs, likes ugly plaid shirts and hates eye contact. Will Graham has an empathy disorder which allows him to fully assume and inhabit another person's point of view - in this case, those persons happen to be serial killers. Will Graham's ability to view a crime scene not just from the perspective of the murderer, but to view himself as the perpetrator, makes him an unconventionally brilliant FBI crime profiler.

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This is Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter likes classical music, fancy suits, and also eating people.

Together, Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter FIGHT CRIME!

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But not really.
Hannibal is far from your conventional crime drama or cop procedural. It is, in fact, better and more awesome in every conceivable way than anything I had been expecting. Based on Thomas Harris' novels, the first season of Hannibal is intended to be a prequel of sorts to Red Dragon, detailing how the esteemed Dr.Hannibal Lecter - still a practising psychiatrist (and professional people-eater) at this point - and Will Graham actually first meet, and begin working together on a series of increasingly disturbing serial murders. Here are some reasons why this show has managed to completely consume my life in under a week :
[content warning for mildly spoilery plot details and a couple of somewhat graphic images]

1. The two leads are the absolute pinnacle of perfect casting choices. 

Hugh Dancy as Will Graham in particular, is a burgerflipping revelation. His strange gift of being able to insert himself into the shoes of sociopaths and psychopaths understandably takes a toll on his psyche, and it is both heartbreaking and fascinating to watch this man falling apart all over the screen, trying desperately to hang on to his rapidly fraying sanity. Every facial expression and mannerism is loaded with pain and desperation and exhaustion. Even the way he walks is a reminder to us of the sheer magnitude of the weight on this man's shoulders. Will's antisocial tendencies are not - as is so typically portrayed in crime/detective shows - rooted in his inability to connect to other people or read social cues and norms. No - if anything, Will Graham connects too much. He allows other people's thoughts and fears and desires and perversions to take up residence in his noodle, and he does this on a regular basis for a living. Dude is super cute, but also fucked up in major ways. This is a haunted man on the verge of totally losing it at any minute (I kind of love Will, if you couldn't tell already, and I need an entire episode in which Will is given lots of hugs and cuddles, plenty of hot soup, and allowed to take a super long nap while someone sits next to him and runs their fingers through his hair.)

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What really cemented my conviction about how terrific Hugh Dancy is in this show can be seen in any one of the "Empathing" scenes, where Will Graham mentally reverses a crime scene and re-enacts the entire thing in his mind, placing himself in the role of the killer. And amazingly, inexplicably, it is as though there are two men sharing Hugh Dancy's face in those moments. You see Will Graham's facial expressions - fear and revulsion and disbelief at the things he sees himself doing - and you see Killer Of The Week's facial expressions. And you can actually tell the difference between the two. Hugh Dancy had better be getting like a million nominations when the next awards season comes round. And even if he doesn't, I'll find a way to let him know that he has already won ALL THE AWARDS in ALL the categories in the Awards Show of my heart.

Mads Mikkelsen is predictably fantastic. He has made the conscious decision to play Hannibal Lecter less along the lines of psychopath and more in the region of a fallen angel. He glides around his magnificent two-level office like Lucifer in a well-tailored three piece suit and impeccably-styled hair. King of his own Underworld. Where Anthony Hopkins was gleeful and camp, Mikkelsen is restrained and subtle, to the point where I sometimes almost forget he is even there. It's a menacing, bubbling-under-the-surface sort of evil, heightened by the dramatic irony of it all - most viewers (unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years) know that Hannibal is a crazy murderous eater of human flesh. But nobody in the show's universe knows. Not yet. And Hannibal plays them all like the bunch of puppets that they are. The guy is a master of manipulation and he focuses the greatest share of his sinister attention upon Will Graham,

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It says a lot about the strength of the character writing on this show that I find the scenes where Will and Hannibal interact in any way - most of the time this involves a lot of talking-  to be faaaaar more fascinating than all the grisly crime scenes the show can throw at me (and it's pretty grisly - we'll get to that in a while). The mind games, the poetic back-and-forths, the strange and twisted friendship brewing between these two men ; it's an absolute masterclass in character study and I can't get enough ohmyGOD.


2. Plot-wise? ALL BETS ARE OFF, YOU GUYS. 

You'd think that watching a TV series based on a set of novels and a handful of films that have been around for a couple of decades, featuring a titular character so iconic that everyone and their grandmother would be able to tell you "Yes, Hannibal probably killed that person, and he probably made crispy lemon liver pate out of them, too. Because everything is people", would simply be an exercise in predictability and going through the motions. Not so, friends. Not so.

Head writer and producer Bryan Fuller - he of Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls genius - has latched upon a storytelling concoction whereby he pays homage to and sometimes even lifts entire scenes and set pieces from the books, but places them in completely different contexts in the TV show. So even if you think you have a pretty good idea of where a particular subplot or character is heading, having seen the films and read the stories, the show just drags the carpet from right under your feet and flips the entire playing board upside down. I thought I knew what was up, and now, by episode 7, I don't. The show is always going to be five to ten steps ahead of you. And I can't wait to see where it's going to take me over the next half of the season.


3. It's disgustingly gorgeous. 

Is elegant gore a thing? Because that's what Hannibal is doing. The show hardly ever indulges in actual onscreen violence, even during Will's Super Empathing sessions ; it prefers to leave you with disturbing but artistically-arranged corpses and the implication of what was actually done. And the effect is something that is terrifying at its core, yet you still can't look away. Even when you know that beautifully-plated serving of foie gras is very likely people meat.

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If you're easily squicked by blood and body horror, I'd recommend you either keep your distance from Hannibal, or at least sample the pilot episode to see how much of it you can actually stomach. A lot of the stuff on this show is pretty out there ; I was doing fairly well until a particularly graphic eye-gouging scene in episode 6 left me mentally flailing (SWEET HEAVEN THAT SCENE WAS NOT FUCKING NECESSARY OKAY, SHOW??).

Icky stuff aside - from a purely cinematographical (is that a word?) and aesthetic perspective, Hannibal is one of the most stunning television shows I have ever seen. The framing is remarkable, the  saturated colours are beautiful. I find myself not paying attention to dialogue sometimes because everything is just so freaking pretty. Even its most horrific images leave me going "Oh my god ugh ugh" and also "holy shit I love this shot".

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I LOVE this shot, you guys (and yes, that is what you think it is).

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There's something thoroughly dreamlike and surreal about the show's tone and atmosphere, and not in a nice way. But it's not exactly nightmarish, either. It evokes a sort of ominously nagging sense of something wrong that you just can't put your finger on. It strikes me as being a little Donnie Darko-ish, in the way the entire look and feel of the show reflects the state of mind of the protagonist. The deeper Will becomes embroiled in these investigations, the harder it becomes for him to get a good night's sleep. And his dreams start bleeding into reality until he's forced to admit that he can't even tell when he's awake. We're bombarded with ever more surreal imagery, as we try to sift through what's legit and what isn't. And yes, it's all beautifully done. Horrific? Yes. Sorrowful? Yes. But always, always, beautiful.

3.5 The violence on this show never feels gratuitous.

Your mileage may vary on this one. I can't exactly breeze through this post without bringing up the admittedly very graphic gore and violence on Hannibal. While I don't feel I'm very qualified to dissect what sort of impact onscreen violence has on real world violence, and what it says about our society and the way we consume our media, for what it's worth I can say this ; Hannibal does not torture porn-ify its violence. They are not sexualizing or fetishizing violence. There are exactly zero rape-y camera angles (hey Supernatural, how you doin') or gratuitously nude female corpses. The violence in Hannibal is intended to make you feel disturbed, and uncomfortable, and uneasy. It's meant to be dark and more than a little sick. And yet every crime scene is arranged with such visual artistry that you can't help taking just a smidgen of pleasure from the morbid aesthetic of it all. And you catch yourself in the moment of...actually enjoying the twisted yet elegant beauty of a body impaled on a set of deer's antlers, crucifixion-style?

And yet, for all the trouble the production crew goes through in making each crime scene look like a piece of art in its own right, we ultimately come back to Will Graham ; we see his disgust and fear as he mentally re-creates the murders, we see him losing sleep and sanity over the things he witnesses at his job. The murder scenes are undeniably aesthetically pleasing, but what sticks with Will - and therefore also with us -  is the brutality, cruelty and the weight of sorrow that lingers in the wake of such senseless deaths. For all its artistic presentation, violence isn't glorified on this show, and gore isn't something to be celebrated.


4. The amount of thought put into details is ridiculous.
I try to approach TV and films with the mindset that nothing is put onscreen by accident. If it's important enough to merit camera time - whether it's a fleeting facial expression or a piece of furniture  - it should mean something, or have some sort of purpose. If you like your television to be nuanced and layered, with symbolism falling out the wazoo, Hannibal will not disappoint. There's just imagery and foreshadowing and metaphors running wild everywhere. It's been a long time since I last came across a show that so richly rewards you for the patience of repeat viewings, analysis and dedicated attention to detail. It has come to the point where I'm pretty much ready to over-analyze anything (Hannibal's ties, Will's plaid shirt patterns). But it's all in good fun, even if some of the stuff I come up with really goes nowhere (Will's facial scruff is directly proportional to his level of sanity in any given episode! Or maybe not!). The visual element of this show is often just as important as dialogue and characterization when it comes to storytelling.

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5. Great lady characters!

They could use some more fleshing out at this point, but they're all terrific, even including the annoying as all hell tabloid reporter Freddie Lounds. They're all intelligent, dignified, snarky, great at their jobs and have amazing outifts. There's FBI lab tech Beverly Katz and her perma-smirk and her insistence on not treating poor tortured Will Graham like a ticking time-bomb. There's Dr. Alana Bloom and her take-no-shit from anyone attitude and great hair. There's the always fabulous Gina Torres, doing an absolutely kick-ass job as Bella Crawford.
And here's the real kicker ; several appearances (and hopefully more in the future) by GILLIAN ANDERSON as Hannibal Lecter's own psychiatrist.

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Bryan Fuller has had a great track record of writing women characters with their own emotional lives who are never purely accessories to the male protagonists, and he hasn't failed with Hannibal so far (in fact it's probably worth mentioning that Alana Bloom and Freddie Lounds were both Alan and Fred in the books, so a little gender-swapping in order to bring in more female characters certainly isn't beneath Mr. Fuller).


6. Dark humour.

Hannibal  is a very dark and very serious and very tragic show. That doesn't mean the writers are above trying to shove as many tasteless (ha!) cannibalism puns into every episode.

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Bryan Fuller is, after all, responsible for Pushing Daisies, a show which effortlessly combined pie-baking and waking the dead - the morbid and the whimsical - to make for one of the quirkiest and darkest shows I've ever watched. Hannibal would be probably be the wrong place to inject some Pushing Daisies style technicolour whimsy, but the somewhat sick sense of humour definitely works, and helps take the edge off a show that always risks taking itself too seriously.



But the show is far from perfect, of course. Will Graham's Super Empathy abilities sometimes veer off into seeming a little bit more psychic than detective, and his leaps of logic or intuition occasionally take a little more suspension of disbelief than I'm willing to provide. The same also applies to the weekly crimes ; some shit just doesn't work. But the cases tie in so seamlessly with the overarching themes of the show that I feel bad for picking nits about technicalities, especially when quite literally everything else about Hannibal is so goshdarned fantastic.

To paraphrase Will Graham, I've hitched my horse to this bandwagon for the long run. This show, you guys. THIS SHOW. It's a beautifully-shot and intelligently written examination of death, madness and the nature of evil. It's strange, gorgeous, dark and painful. It's also flawed, but when it's good, it's never just good ; it aims for - and sometimes reaches - profundity in ways very few other things I've watched can match up to.

So make some time in your weekly schedule to watch Hannibal, guys. Every time the show gets a new viewer, Hugh Dancy smiles. And when Hugh Dancy smiles, puppies are born and daisies burst forth from the ground and NBC decides not to be a bag of dicks and lets this show run for a second season.



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Special Agent Will Graham thanks you for your time.

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