TV (The Book) by Alan Sepinwall & Matt Zoller Seitz

Author:Alan Sepinwall & Matt Zoller Seitz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Performing Arts / Television / Guides & Reviews, Performing Arts / Television / History & Criticism
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015) Total score: 86

Bryan Fuller’s riff on the world of novelist Thomas Harris, the father of Hannibal Lecter, was one of the great TV shows of the twenty-first century, and one of the least likely candidates for greatness. By the time the creator of Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies offered his take on the patient-devouring psychiatrist and all ancillary characters in his bloody universe, the good doctor had been the subject of four novels and five films, not to mention innumerable imitative books, movies, and shows built around puppet masters who killed bushels of people and inspired others to kill, all while staying a step ahead of FBI profilers who were all modeled on Harris’s other innovative pulp archetype, Will Graham. On top of all that, Lecter had previously been portrayed by two actors whose work was so strong that partisans still argue over whose interpretation is greater: Brian Cox’s ice-cold Lecter in Manhunter, or Anthony Hopkins’s wicked hambone in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon.

As Lecter, Mads Mikkelsen offered a new interpretation of the character. He was even more brazenly a fantasy-identification figure than his predecessors—as much the hero of this sprawling nightmare as Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost or Tom Ripley the hero of Patricia Highsmith’s fiction. Mikkelsen was arguably the first performer to successfully incarnate every preposterous assertion made about Lecter in Harris’s books. He was believable as a therapist with superior listening skills and a strategic capacity for warmth, capable of fooling the world into thinking he was treating patients rather than grooming them as victims or apprentice killers, and helping the FBI solve a seemingly unending parade of murders without tipping them off to the fact that he was the mastermind. Mikkelsen was also credible as an elegant lover who unwound by shampooing his lover’s hair, an action hero who could go toe-to-toe with Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), and a polymath aesthete who could play Carnegie Hall–quality sonatas on piano or harpsichord, cook five-star meals from meats of questionable origin, and (in the season 3 premiere) land a professorship at a university in Florence by revealing a heretofore unknown capacity for speaking fluent Italian. (The chair was open, of course, because Lecter had created the vacancy.)

By all rights, Hannibal should have been both too silly and too violent to sustain itself for more than a few weeks. But it got richer, more assured, and more audacious as it went along, always taking the most surprising, at times circuitous route toward a destination. The show ran just three seasons but took such great strides that by the end of season 3, viewers might have felt as if they’d been watching the serial-killer equivalent of one of those evolutionary charts that starts with a razor-toothed fish and ends with a man in a suit carrying a briefcase. Fuller’s tour of Harris land jettisoned the occasionally dreamlike approach of earlier features in favor of a full-on nightmare, unbound by real-world logic or plausibility, that got weirder, more ostentatiously sensual, and more impenetrable as it went along.

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