Hannibal
So it's only 2 episodes so far but I'm really into this new NBC show Hannibal. Which probably means it will either be cancelled within the first 10 episodes or it will die a long slow death in which every year I have to bemoan how all my favorite shows are watched by me and 2 of my friends.
I wasn't sure about Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter when I first heard the news and thought they were going to make this an annoying procedural show like NCIS or Law & Order but (TWIST!) one of the crime fighters is a serial killer! No one's done that before!!!!
(not)
But now that I think about it, it was stupid. Mads Mikkelsen is fantastic. I watched Valhalla Rising the other day and was fascinated by the kind of emotion he could convey without saying a word and maintaining a stoic persona. Also, Nicolas Winding Refn has a problem with dialogue. Save for Bronson I can't recall watching a single movie done by him that wasn't filled with silence and mood music. What's up with that? And all of them featured surprising and oddly visceral violence.
As Lecter I think Mikkelsen is TOO weird. If he was my doctor I think I would've gotten the creeps from him. He's too cool, too collected, and he comes off almost emotionless. There is a certain charm to him but I always imagined Dr. Lecter as being quite relatable. Very charming. Like no one would notice that he was a complete psychopath because he could charm you with how urbane and cultured he was. Certainly he's making his way through the cast with his fantastic cooking, which by the way, is a really creepy and effective narrative device. We as the audience know who Hannibal is. The show takes advantage of the knowledge we bring into the show. He eats people. Who hasn't seen Silence of the Lambs? So in knowing this every scene in which he is eating or feeding someone we wonder, "is that really pork? Or is it a person?" And when you watch another character eat the food he prepares you visibly cringe. You don't know, they don't know, but they have the luxury of ignorance. We don't.
I love it.
But sometimes it's people. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just pork.
But generally speaking I feel like Mikkelsen plays him in such a way that you wouldn't be surprised to learn he's a mass murderer. He's kind of creepy.....
The focus of the show is on Will Graham and his relationship with Lecter pre-Red Dragon. Back before Graham caught Lecter. I haven't read Red Dragon in a while. I know that Graham was written as a brilliant detective who was able to get into the heads of the killers but I don't remember him having an autism spectrum disorder. It's an interesting approach, I guess, except that there are already A LOT of these characters floating around. Abed. Temperance Brennan. River Tam. The issue with these sort of things is that the behavior isn't always consistent with an autism spectrum disorder and it's not always actually Asperger or whatever. Sometimes writers just borrow the behaviors as they see fit without quite understanding how these things work. We'll see where Will falls with that. The show has already stated he's on the very functional side of the spectrum but how strict are they going to be with this diagnosis?
Hugh Dancy plays Will good though. I like how they shape his character, how by the end of the second episode we as the audience begin to question just how much he is able to separate himself from the people he understands so well. Are you a bad person if you enjoy killing killers? Or are you a bad person for enjoying to kill in general?
Maybe it's partly my own tastes but I love that the show focuses heavily on the impact these cases have on the characters, on the emotional toll this work has taken on will. Then I love the way it's filtered through Dr. Lecter's cold methodical eyes and I love seeing how he sees things, seeing how he interprets Will and his struggling. Hannibal Lecter is one of my favorite fictional characters. I'm relieved and glad that Hannibal turned out to be something that does the character and the material justice and not something hackneyed and cliched like how it could have so easily gone.
One interesting thing I'm going to have to keep an eye out for is the journalist character, Freddie Lounds. Freddie was originally a male and I like the change to female given that Harris never offered a whole lot of female characters in his book sin general. But I always hated Freddie. Like HATED him. He was a complete dick. He ruined cases, obstructed justice, got into things he shouldn't be getting into, and I was constantly hoping someone would murder him. I started falling into old habits while watching episode too, wishing Lecter would just eat her and save me the grief. Making her female kind of forces me to reconsider my animosity toward the character. I want a more involved female character since the main cast is all men. There are a couple supporting females but they are supporting with a capitol "s." Freddie Lounds is annoying but she gets some things to do and is genuinely clever, albeit completely morally bankrupt and devoid of any remorse for anything that she does. I get the feeling Lecter will keep her alive simply because he finds her amusing but he wont allow her to continue to deconstruct Will who - let's just admit it - is hanging on by a thread emotionally speaking. I feel like Lecter likes Will but he also understands the serial killers in a way Will never will. He feels like these people should be allowed to do what they want and he doesn't care who dies, probably because that's how he feels. Lecter always functioned on a strange twisted sort of moral code. He respects Will for his ability to understand these killers and catch them but he also enjoys existing in a world where these killers can continue to do what they do.
But back to Freddie. I don't like that our first interesting female character is a moral-less slimebag, especially because unlike with the male characters we don't get a legitimate/morally ambiguous hero. The other is sort of a wet blanket and is obviously just the love interest. The FBI coroner, Beverly Katz is pretty cool though and I hope we get more of her. She doesn't flinch at dead bodies and she makes funny jokes. I'm interested to see where they go as the series continues and also, if the show is popular, how many seasons they would stretch out the Lecter thing. I mean, at some point, Will figures it out and catches him. But that would signify the end of the series. I don't know if NBC has the kind of integrity to let a show have a set number of seasons in order to create a real and well crafted series ender but I hope, if they cancel it within a few seasons, they give them enough warning to make it work.
I wasn't sure about Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter when I first heard the news and thought they were going to make this an annoying procedural show like NCIS or Law & Order but (TWIST!) one of the crime fighters is a serial killer! No one's done that before!!!!
(not)
But now that I think about it, it was stupid. Mads Mikkelsen is fantastic. I watched Valhalla Rising the other day and was fascinated by the kind of emotion he could convey without saying a word and maintaining a stoic persona. Also, Nicolas Winding Refn has a problem with dialogue. Save for Bronson I can't recall watching a single movie done by him that wasn't filled with silence and mood music. What's up with that? And all of them featured surprising and oddly visceral violence.
As Lecter I think Mikkelsen is TOO weird. If he was my doctor I think I would've gotten the creeps from him. He's too cool, too collected, and he comes off almost emotionless. There is a certain charm to him but I always imagined Dr. Lecter as being quite relatable. Very charming. Like no one would notice that he was a complete psychopath because he could charm you with how urbane and cultured he was. Certainly he's making his way through the cast with his fantastic cooking, which by the way, is a really creepy and effective narrative device. We as the audience know who Hannibal is. The show takes advantage of the knowledge we bring into the show. He eats people. Who hasn't seen Silence of the Lambs? So in knowing this every scene in which he is eating or feeding someone we wonder, "is that really pork? Or is it a person?" And when you watch another character eat the food he prepares you visibly cringe. You don't know, they don't know, but they have the luxury of ignorance. We don't.
I love it.
But sometimes it's people. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just pork.
But generally speaking I feel like Mikkelsen plays him in such a way that you wouldn't be surprised to learn he's a mass murderer. He's kind of creepy.....
The focus of the show is on Will Graham and his relationship with Lecter pre-Red Dragon. Back before Graham caught Lecter. I haven't read Red Dragon in a while. I know that Graham was written as a brilliant detective who was able to get into the heads of the killers but I don't remember him having an autism spectrum disorder. It's an interesting approach, I guess, except that there are already A LOT of these characters floating around. Abed. Temperance Brennan. River Tam. The issue with these sort of things is that the behavior isn't always consistent with an autism spectrum disorder and it's not always actually Asperger or whatever. Sometimes writers just borrow the behaviors as they see fit without quite understanding how these things work. We'll see where Will falls with that. The show has already stated he's on the very functional side of the spectrum but how strict are they going to be with this diagnosis?
Hugh Dancy plays Will good though. I like how they shape his character, how by the end of the second episode we as the audience begin to question just how much he is able to separate himself from the people he understands so well. Are you a bad person if you enjoy killing killers? Or are you a bad person for enjoying to kill in general?
Maybe it's partly my own tastes but I love that the show focuses heavily on the impact these cases have on the characters, on the emotional toll this work has taken on will. Then I love the way it's filtered through Dr. Lecter's cold methodical eyes and I love seeing how he sees things, seeing how he interprets Will and his struggling. Hannibal Lecter is one of my favorite fictional characters. I'm relieved and glad that Hannibal turned out to be something that does the character and the material justice and not something hackneyed and cliched like how it could have so easily gone.
One interesting thing I'm going to have to keep an eye out for is the journalist character, Freddie Lounds. Freddie was originally a male and I like the change to female given that Harris never offered a whole lot of female characters in his book sin general. But I always hated Freddie. Like HATED him. He was a complete dick. He ruined cases, obstructed justice, got into things he shouldn't be getting into, and I was constantly hoping someone would murder him. I started falling into old habits while watching episode too, wishing Lecter would just eat her and save me the grief. Making her female kind of forces me to reconsider my animosity toward the character. I want a more involved female character since the main cast is all men. There are a couple supporting females but they are supporting with a capitol "s." Freddie Lounds is annoying but she gets some things to do and is genuinely clever, albeit completely morally bankrupt and devoid of any remorse for anything that she does. I get the feeling Lecter will keep her alive simply because he finds her amusing but he wont allow her to continue to deconstruct Will who - let's just admit it - is hanging on by a thread emotionally speaking. I feel like Lecter likes Will but he also understands the serial killers in a way Will never will. He feels like these people should be allowed to do what they want and he doesn't care who dies, probably because that's how he feels. Lecter always functioned on a strange twisted sort of moral code. He respects Will for his ability to understand these killers and catch them but he also enjoys existing in a world where these killers can continue to do what they do.
But back to Freddie. I don't like that our first interesting female character is a moral-less slimebag, especially because unlike with the male characters we don't get a legitimate/morally ambiguous hero. The other is sort of a wet blanket and is obviously just the love interest. The FBI coroner, Beverly Katz is pretty cool though and I hope we get more of her. She doesn't flinch at dead bodies and she makes funny jokes. I'm interested to see where they go as the series continues and also, if the show is popular, how many seasons they would stretch out the Lecter thing. I mean, at some point, Will figures it out and catches him. But that would signify the end of the series. I don't know if NBC has the kind of integrity to let a show have a set number of seasons in order to create a real and well crafted series ender but I hope, if they cancel it within a few seasons, they give them enough warning to make it work.