Asking the Wrong Questions

Two years ago, writing after the end of Hannibal 's first season, I called the show a rich but ultimately unsatisfying feast.  I admired a lot about Bryan Fuller's take on Thomas Harris's novels and their sadistic, cannibalistic central character: its use of visuals and music to set an almost oppressively dreamlike tone, its willingness to flout the conventions of good storytelling, its clever reinvention and reuse of the central set-pieces of Harris's novels.  But at the end of its first season, I still didn't have a strong sense of what Hannibal wanted to be, what story it wanted to tell.  The show seemed to be having far too much fun staging gruesome tableaux of murder victims and letting its demonic title character (played with a perfect dry mischievousness by Mads Mikkelsen) pull the wool over all the other characters' eyes.  What it wanted to achieve with any of those elements, what emotion it wanted to evoke, was utterly unclear to me. Two years later...

The first time I read Thomas Harris's Red Dragon was more than fifteen years ago, in the white heat of having discovered and been wowed by its more famous sequel, The Silence of the Lambs .  Standing in such stark comparison to the later book, which takes the elements that Red Dragon innovates--cutting between the points of view of the killer and the FBI agent pursuing him, focusing on the psychology of, and extending compassion to, both of them, featuring competent, multifaceted female characters at every turn of the plot--and does them better, Red Dragon couldn't help but come off badly, and for years I've thought of it as a disappointing work (it probably didn't help that my favorite character in the Lecter sequence, Clarice Starling, does not appear in this book). Coming back to Red Dragon this week in preparation for writing this piece, I discovered a much stronger book than I had remembered, a smart, engaging thriller with an undertone of melancholy that onl...

The original plan was for this post to go up a month or so ago, when all of these shows were really at the pilot phase or just a bit after it.  But with one thing and another, here we are already at summer's doorstep (and thus, at the doorstep of the summer pilot season), and some of the new shows I'm about to write about have already wrapped up their debut seasons.  Still, there's a lot here to talk about--some interesting ideas even if the execution sometimes leaves a bit to be desired, and several venues that I hadn't been paying much attention to and which now might be worth a closer look. In the Flesh - Despite its unnaturally long afterlife, the zombie craze is at least five years past its peak, so it's a bit surprising to find anyone, much less the BBC, trying to put a fresh spin on it.  Still, the premise that In the Flesh comes up with is at least a little bit different, as its focus isn't on surviving the zombie uprising (which has already happened...