When Bryan Fuller spoke about the pilot in development to reboot The Munsters, my interest in the project just about tripled. The same can safely be said for his recent comments on the Hannibal series. Fuller had some interesting things to say about where the series picks up and what we can expect from this take on Hannibal Lecter.
From what Entertainment Weekly reports, Fuller is looking to use the the few pages of backstory on Lecter’s character offered in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon as the basis for his drama series, which already has a 13-episode series order from NBC.
Here’s what Fuller had to say about where the series fits into the story...
“It’s before he was incarcerated, so he’s more of a peacock,” Fuller tells EW.com. “There is a cheery disposition to our Hannibal. He’s not being telegraphed as a villain. If the audience didn’t know who he was, they wouldn’t see him coming. What we have is Alfred Hitchcock’s principle of suspense — show the audience the bomb under the table and let them sweat when it’s going to go boom. So the audience knows who Hannibal is so we don’t have to overplay his villainy. We get to subvert his legacy and give the audience twists and turns.”
The story sounds like it’ll have sort of a Dexter/double-life kind of quality, as Hannibal is an unknown/unsuspected serial killer. He’ll even be rubbing elbows with some law enforcers, as the series will have him solving crimes with FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). Fuller describes that relationship as “a love story” (“for lack of a better description”), which I’m not interpreting as a romance so much as a relationship between two men who are alike in many ways and very different in others.
For those of you hoping to see some other characters from Harris’ book, it sounds like they will be making appearances, though some will be “Starbucked,” meaning genders will be reversed. Just as Dr. Watson has been made female in the CBS pilot Elementary (with Lucy Liu playing her), Dr. Alan Bloom in the Hannibal story will be Dr. Alana Bloom. And the tabloid journalist Freddy Lounds is not only going to be a female (“Fredricka Lounds”), but her profession will have been updated to blogger.
There’s definitely potential for this story to work on television, but network TV could prove tricky for a show involving serial killing. Regardless, Fuller’s involvement and his recent comments have me intrigued.
