CODE RED TV SHOW 1996 SERIES
We can only speculate as to the reasons the series didn’t connect beyond a cliquish few. (The French studio Gaumont primarily financed the show.) We might then turn that around and ask why so few viewers, beyond a bunch of effusive television critics and an impassioned cult of ‘Fannibals’, were in love with Hannibal? The series was a consistent underperformer in the ratings, yet the television network NBC withheld the axe until this year due to the praise it garnered, as well as the relatively cheap licensing fee they paid to air it. “Is Hannibal in love with me?” Will asks the sociopathic psychiatrist Bedelia Du Maurier (a mesmerising Gillian Anderson) in the series’ penultimate episode, finally expressing the ache that he’s denied for so long. Even though Graham and Lecter have relationships with women throughout the show’s run, it is clear – at least from the early first season episode in which Hannibal intimately sniffs Will from behind – where their true yearnings lie.
CODE RED TV SHOW 1996 SERIAL
(See Silence of the Lambs's transgender serial killer Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb for a much-debated example.) Fuller, who is gay, took the peripheral otherness of Harris’s depiction of LGBT characters and made it the heart of the series. The Lecter novels and films often had an unsettling relationship to characters outside the heterosexual norm. Fuller’s choice to begin Hannibal at the start of the duo’s twisted friendship, with a pre-incarceration Lecter providing subtly poisonous advice to Graham while he investigated a number of twisted serial-killers-of-the-week, allowed for a bruising intimacy between them that built over time. Over the course of the series, Graham was Lecter’s ultimate symbolic meal.
(He certainly ties a mean Balthus knot.) Recalling his youth in a third season episode, Hannibal notes, “I was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust.” From Mikkelsen’s contemptuously pursed lips, purple dialogue like that became poetry, and further emphasised Lecter’s essential distance from the prey he would both metaphorically and literally devour. This doctor seemed to spring straight from the inferno, all cloven-footed charisma and killer attire. Then there was Hannibal himself, played by the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen with a devilish insouciance that differentiated him from the approaches of Cox and Hopkins. Races and genders of other characters were juggled – FBI Agent-in-Charge Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) became African-American Will’s confidant Dr Alan Bloom became the female Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) – upending Harris’s primarily white male-dominated world, and also making up for the fact that Fuller could never secure the rights to Silence or Clarice Starling since they were owned by MGM. So viewers were treated to a Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) much more conspicuously raw and transparently emotive than his prior incarnations. While Harris’s books, and the best of the films, may have been holy texts to Fuller, nothing in them was necessarily sacred. What would he do differently? First and foremost, he approached the Lecter universe with a fan’s idiosyncratic passion. In this book and its follow up, The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter was a colourful supporting player, a behind-bars foil who provided information for criminal profiler Will Graham and FBI agent Clarice Starling at the price of worming his way into their psyches.Įnter Bryan Fuller, the US TV auteur behind the quirky series Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies. Both the films and the books featuring Dr Hannibal Lecter had devolved since author Thomas Harris first introduced the cannibalistic psychiatrist in his 1981 procedural thriller Red Dragon. When it first screened over two years ago, there was reason to doubt Hannibal’s longevity. Its impact on critics and many others who care passionately about TV says much about our current television landscape, though: you don’t necessarily need to be a hit to make a mark. Yet those who did watch frequently praised Hannibal as one of the most inventive and distinctive series ever made.
(Canada and other territories have already had a taste of the closing installment.) Despite being adapted from a well-established franchise of novels and running for three seasons, the show never found much of an audience.
And as we raise the digestif to our lips, we might pause, before sipping, and ponder the feast that was Hannibal , the series finale of which airs on US TV on Saturday, 29 August.