Hannibal

You could say it’s as close as a broadcast network has gotten to the personal artistry of the best premium-cable shows, if it weren’t bolder and more elegant than anything on pay cable right now, including HBO’s own serial-killer drama, True Detective.

Hannibal has always been beautiful, and that’s still the case. It’s also always featured dialogue and plots that stay just on the right side of being too pretentious, and that remains the case. If there are any notable steps up from season one, it’s both in the tension that mounts thanks to the great game played between Will and Hannibal and in the better use of the show’s supporting cast.

Its intensity, intelligence and dark power are the equal of anything on cable, with riveting performances led by Mikkelsen as the dapper, sinister fiend-in-plain-sight and Hugh Dancy as his tormented patsy, FBI profiler Will Graham.

Hannibal is thematically brilliant and dense in ways that most network television is not, but it wouldn't remotely work without its committed, incredibly talented cast. Dancy and Mikkelson continue to redefine these characters to the point that they're making them their own while Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, and another great guest turn by Gillian Anderson elevate the overall ensemble.

Hannibal captures your imagination with the prospect of Graham using his imagination to figure a way out. [28 Feb 2014, p.65]

For its authentic engagement with despair, Hannibal earns its wrenching nihilism: It's a great, epic vision of American horror.

The last thing television needs is more serial killer dramas. But when they're this well made, this smart and creative and unexpectedly funny? Then, yes, more Hannibal, please.

It’s the thinking man’s serial-killer drama, a twisted tale that never trolls for cheap scares but is plenty terrifying.

Hannibal is much better than it once was, perhaps the guiltiest pleasure on television at this time.

[A] sense of humor keeps Hannibal from being unbearably dark even when the crimes are, and they always are.

The psychological cat-and-mouse games the characters play are more interesting and a welcome respite from the intense, horrifying serial killer stories.

The show succeeds, to the extent it does, thanks to the braininess of its characters, Mikkelson’s positively reptilian approach to Lecter--taking a character with which the audience is so familiar and making it his own--and the clever use of a bracing season-opening sequence that frames essentially everything to come as an extended flashback.