Hannibal: He slices AND dices!

The NBC TV series Hannibal is a show that shouldn’t work. It’s a show that’s based on a book series that inspired a mega-popular set of films. And the title character of Hannibal as portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in these films is cemented in popular culture with spine-tingling lines like, “I ate his liver with some fava beans,” that still resonates today. And the fact that Hopkins won an Oscar for his portrayal of Hannibal doesn’t hurt either.

hannibals3-3So anything like a TV show that has a central premise of doing a revision on Hannibal Lector’s backstory as well as having a different actor in the title role should have crashed and burned in an episode or two.

Yet Brian Fuller’s version of Hannibal is so much different than anything that’s come before and is so well written and acted instead of being terrible is one of the best things on TV today.

While there seems to be a lot of material produced on the character of Hannibal Lector, before the TV series there really wasn’t. There were really only four novels that featured the character; Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006), all of which were turned into movies at various points.

And the stories these books tell starts with the Hannibal character caught and already in prison in Red Dragon, his escape in The Silence of the Lambs, on the run in Hannibal and then Hannibal Rising went back in time to a much younger Hannibal and revealed how he got the taste for human flesh.

But other than some flashbacks none of these Hannibal stories dealt with just what Hannibal was doing at his medical practice before he was caught for his crimes and sent to prison. Enter the Hannibal TV show.

Know this: the Hannibal show IS NOT a TV version of the 2001 Hannibal movie. The TV series follows a pre-jail Hannibal where he’s a trusted asset to the FBI in hunting serial killers.

“You’re not my friend. Even the light from friendship won’t reach us for a million years.” Will Graham on Hannibal Lecter

In the first season Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) along with special agent Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) together track serial killers across the US. And with Hannibal’s inside information of being a serial killer but no one knowing this yet and Graham’s weird ability to almost literally enter the minds of the killers the team are very successful at what they do.

But no one suspects that in reality Hannibal is one of the worst serial killers on record, the Chesapeake Ripper. And that slowly Hannibal is setting up Graham to take the fall for his killings.

“I wanted to surprise you. I knew you wanted to surprise me.” Hannibal Lector

hannibal_ver9The second season of Hannibal dealt with Graham in prison trying to prove his innocence, which is tougher that you’d expect with someone as detail oriented as Hannibal who’d spent months setting Graham up, and then he and Crawford trying to entrap Hannibal and jail him for the killings.

Think Sherlock vs Moriarty, except that if Sherlock loses Moriarty eats Sherlock and you’re close to what the second season of Hannibal is.

Where Hannibal is different than every other serial killer drama that’s on TV today, and boy are there loads of bad ones, is that Hannibal goes places none of those other shows dare to tread. Be it with characters questioning the very nature of reality to gorgeous yet disgusting set design to the idea of what exactly is good and evil.

Lesser series rely on cliched plots where the good guys always gets the bad guys. Hannibal instead relies on clever storytelling and plot twists.

“When it comes to nature versus nurture, I choose neither.” Hannibal Lecter

The third season of Hannibal is set to premier Thursday, June 4 on NBC and deals with Hannibal on the run as well as elements from the Red Dragon story. But whatever the third season of Hannibal has in store I can only imagine that it’ll be fascinating and cringe worthy and as exciting as the previous two seasons have been.

The best TV series of 2014

The last several years, this one included, the new fall TV season has been underwhelming at best and just plain bad at worst. It’s not like there aren’t any interesting new shows on in the fall anymore, it’s just that there are so few of them. If the fall season is so blargh, then lately the winter, spring and summer TV seasons have been a true joy. In fact, you won’t find a single series here that started in the fall. Each and every one was a non-fall show.

The methods I use to determine my “best of” lists changes every year. Sometimes I try to rank the shows best to worst throughout the year and sometimes it’s simply based on my mood when compiling the list at the end of the year. That being said, this year I did things a bit differently. The list this year is mostly based on how much I wanted to watch a season of a show again after having finished it. And the show that kept coming to the top of my list when thinking about this was The Americans on FX.

The Americans

Phillip Jennings: “The KGB is everywhere.”

The "normal" Jennings family
The “normal” Jennings family

The Americans is the rare series that’s actually about something. The first season of the show was about what it’s like to be a married couple in the US in the guise of a 1980s period spy drama of USSR vs USA and this season was about what it takes to get someone to betray their ideals in pursuit of a greater cause.

Here, characters Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) are KGB agents posing as a normal married American couple in early 1980s Washington DC but they’re really Soviet sleeper agents out to bring down the red white and blue. In this most recent season, Philip and Elizabeth are trying to uncover the secrets of new stealth technology while at the same time hunting the killer of another KGB family that was a mirror of the Jennings’.

What was really interesting with The Americans this season were the places series creators were willing to go. Be it with the murder of an entire family, Elizabeth mentoring an young idealist agent who shares the same ideals whom Elizabeth must sacrifice for the greater good to Phillip and Elizabeth learning that while mother Russia might want Phillip and Elizabeth to make sacrifices for “the cause,” that’s nothing compared to what they have in store for their children.

Halt and Catch Fire

Joe MacMillan: “I’m not talking about money, I’m talking about legacy.”
Cameron Howe: “You’re not the future, you’re a footnote.

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Mackenzie Davis in Halt and Catch Fire

I’m not sure how or why, but I seem to be the only critic out there who liked Halt and Catch Fire, let alone loved it. Some have complained that Halt is too much like Mad Men with it taking place in the corporate world, having a young woman as an up and coming employee with a strong male with a self destructive streak in the lead. As if only Mad Men were allowed to do this or even that Mad Men is far from the first series to play out this way.

Regardless, I was enamored where Halt went with certain characters being plowed under by the stress of trying to create a new PC in the early 1980s and others rising to the challenge. And not to spoil the ending of the first season too much, but if every other show out there is about people building something great and successful, Halt was about building something that turned out to be, at best, average. I’m not sure any show has ever done that before.

Hannibal

Hannibal Lecter: “Occasionally I drop a teacup to shatter on the floor. On purpose. I’m not satisfied when it doesn’t gather itself up again. Someday, perhaps a cup will come together.”

2013-blog-hannibal-hugh-madsIf the first season of Hannibal was about FBI detective Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) trying to track down a serial killer who they don’t realize is Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), then the second season is about the FBI trying to catch Lecter in a trap and jail him for the murders. Except the one guy you don’t try and trap is the guy who’s going to be ahead of you every step of the way setting traps of his own.

True Detective

If Hannibal was head-trippy then True Detective was acid-trippy. It’s a show that seems to divide up my friends nicely. Some of whom loved it and character Rust Cohle’s (Matthew McConaughey) ramblings about the intricacies of good and evil in an uncaring universe while others hated the show and found the series to over the top and boring.

Community

In its fifth season Community returned with series creator Dan Harmon back at the helm after an absence of a year and returned a sheen of greatness to a series that had faltered in recent years.

Sherlock

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in Sherlock
Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in Sherlock

Even if micro-series Sherlock is only three episodes long, they’re some of the best hours you’ll spend in front of the television. If there’s anything I’m worried about with Sherlock is that while there are two season’s of the show left, Sherlock star  Benedict Cumberbatch is now on the verge of uber-stardom with recently being cast as Doctor Strange in a Marvel movie and I can’t see him wanting to stick with Sherlock any longer than he’s contractually obligated to do so.

Game of Thrones

I find it humorous when people binge-watch past seasons of something like Game of Thrones in a few days or weeks. They have absolutely no idea of the excruciating wait between new seasons that makes viewer’s wait nearly 10 months between the end of a season and the start of the next agonizing. I’m not complaining, though. When it’s on Game of Thrones is the best thing on TV. I do wonder if it had aired in the fall rather than spring if Game of Thrones wouldn’t have made an appearance much higher on this list?

Orange is the New Black

Taylor Schilling
Taylor Schilling

While Orange is the New Black did start off a bit slow this season and focused on more characters than Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) as in the first — the sure sign that someone is trying to stretch out a show into multiple seasons — I thought the back half of Orange was just as good as the first season of the show.

Veep

Another great year for a great comedy almost no one’s talking about. Here’s to President Meyer!

The Knick

Writer/Director Steven Soderbergh returned to TV with The Knick, a series about a hospital at the turn of the 20th century New York City. In The Knick, medicine is taking leaps and bounds forward like never before. Even if it means that most people who go into the hospital end up dying there or that having a doctor like John W. Thackery (Clive Owen) hooked on cocaine is not only legal, it’s normal.

Quotes of note – Hannibal: “Mizumono”

Hannibal - Season 2Hannibal Lecter: “When the fox hears the rabbit scream he comes running – but not to help.”
Bella Crawford: “I’m between deaths.”
Hannibal Lecter: “The punctuation at the end of a sentance gives meaning to every word.”
Bella Crawford: “You moved my punctuation mark, you moved my meaning.”
Freddie Lounds: “I’m going to enjoy my resurrection.”
Hannibal Lecter: “I’m dismantling who I was and moving it brick by brick.”
Hannibal Lecter: “Be blind, Alana. Don’t be brave.”
Hannibal Lecter: “I wanted to surprise you. I knew you wanted to surprise me.”