Hannibal

            Last week, NBC’s Hannibal, a reimagining of the characters from Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, finished its low-rated and critically adored first season. Despite its low ratings, NBC has already ordered a second season to premiere in 2014. Hannibal’s renewal came mostly from the show’s international financing deal that takes much of the financial responsibility off of NBC’s shoulders. The deal also makes the show’s anemic ratings more palpable as NBC does not have to pay the full cost of the production and suffer through its low ratings.

The international financing and investment in a previously known property represent two hallmarks of the reign of NBC president Robert Greenblatt. Greenblatt has invested heavily in previously existing commercial properties or actors. This includes shows such as Hannibal, the disastrous Do No Harm (a Jekyll and Hyde rip-off), the upcoming Ironside, Michael J. Fox’s upcoming comedy, the recently cancelled Matthew Perry vehicle Go On, Mockingbird Lane, and Sean Hayes’ s soon to be cancelled new fall show. NBC’s heyday of critically successful drama ended when ER and The West Wing left the air and only a deal with Direct-TV saved the similarly critically adored, but scantly watched Friday Night Lights.

            Hannibal earns its critical praise by deftly exploring the psychological toll of pursuing serial killers and dealing with the horror of their crimes. The show focuses on three lead characters. Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), a psychological fragile FBI profiler, who tries to balance his ability to enter and understand the minds of serial killers with his own fear of devolving into a killer himself. Jack Crawford, ably played with a simmering anger by Laurence Fishburne, heads the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, where he must balance the need to catch dangerous criminals and Graham’s delicate psyche. Mads Mikkelsen plays the titular role of Hannibal Lecter. Mikkelsen makes the role his own by completely moving away from Anthony Hopkins’s scene chewing performance. Mikkelsen presents Lecter as the portrait of restraint. His impeccable clothing, accent, affinity for haute cuisine, and keen psychological insight all mask the monster that lies within. Lecter’s crimes, which have earned him the nickname of the “Chesapeake Ripper” function as performance. Lecter finds and creates art in the brutal and horrific destruction of human beings. He takes similar pleasure in creating gourmet dishes, sometimes made of his victims. He ingratiates himself to Crawford and the FBI through a series of weekly discussions with Graham designed to bolster the profiler’s mental stability. At the same time Lecter learns about and manipulates Graham and the FBI and its investigation into the “Chesapeake Ripper.”

            Hannibal, created and show-run by Bryan Fuller, separates itself and rises above the chum of police procedurals by using graphic violence to demonstrate the psychological trauma that these crimes take on the investigators. Depictions of violence in the series include; a totem pole made of human bodies, cannibalism, murder victims used to grow mushrooms, and murder victims with their skin cut to resemble angels. Throughout the first season, Graham remains haunted by his justifiable decision to shoot and kill a serial killer. He dreams of the killer, known as the “Minnesota Shrike,” in vivid fashion—imagining himself committing the Shrike’s crimes. Graham’s special ability to understand serial killers revolves around his ability to reimagine their crimes with himself as the perpetrator. The show takes the viewer along on the trip in Graham’s damaged psyche by showing Graham committing murders. This terrifying ability leads Graham to question whether by understanding these killers will lead him to become one. He manifests this psychological instability through vivid and visually disturbing dreams, sleepwalking, lapses in his ability to perceive the passage of time and through his doubts expressed to Lecter in their informal therapy sessions. The violence of these crimes haunt Graham and the viewer. Throughout the first season, Graham’s psyche reality erodes to the point where the Crawford and the FBI come to believe that Graham has committed a series of murders himself.  Unlike Criminal Minds or The Following, the stark depictions of violence service the plot by demonstrating how and why Graham would come to question his own sanity. Without such graphic demonstrations of brutality, the show would fail in its purpose of portraying the psychological trauma that upsets Graham’s tenuous hold over his own sanity. Ultimately Hannibal’s relentless depictions of violence offer a necessary corrective to the casual violence of so many crime procedurals by graphically exploring the psychological cost of such violence.