Our Highest Rec: Some Shows Are Perfect, But Hannibal Was Flawless
Our Highest Rec is when the staff proposes something they find underappreciated, undervalued, or underrated. It's an excuse for us to push our opinions on you.
To describe any cultural item as ‘perfect’ is, practically speaking, useless. What does it mean to make a perfect show? A perfect movie? Write a perfect book? To a reader of criticism, it tells you nothing qualitative about the work itself, other than that, in some abstract or incoherent way, it was well-crafted. Perfect is meaningless. ‘Flawless’ might not be. Shoutout Beyoncé.
Can something be perfect still have flaws? In the world of pop culture, you could probably say yes. The Wire stumbled a bit in its second season, but we still have agreed that as a show, it’s perfect. It was perfect for its time, perfect for its broadcaster in HBO, and perfect in its eternal importance. The Wire has little dings and dents you’d want to buff out, but it has that little something extra that makes it, in the eyes of American television consumers, perfect. Something about its legacy, its urgency, or its relevancy makes it so. The fact that it has flaws doesn’t hold it back from being perfect either. Those flaws have simply entered The Wire’s myth, and in a way, they elevate and complicate the conversation around the show. For something that was elevated and complicated to begin with, that seems to fit just fine.
Can something without flaws not be perfect? In some ways, this is more challenging to say, which brings us to the fantastic, fatalistic, doomed NBC horror-drama Hannibal. From its debut in 2013 until its cancellation in 2015, few network shows took more risks and saw fewer rewards. There’s a case to be made (and we’ll only partially make it here) that Hannibal is one of the greatest shows to grace television since Breaking Bad. It’s a shame you never saw it.
Hannibal is about what you think it’s about: Hannibal Lecter. Mads Mikkelsen—he played the Casino Royale villain who bled from his eye—plays the title character, and he’s the center of a show that, for three exceptional seasons, gave us backstory (though thankfully, not an origin story) to Thomas Harris’ famous cannibal. Hugh Dancy plays Lecter’s FBI counterpart in Will Graham (he appears in some of the other Lecter stories, Red Dragon especially), and such notable stars as Laurence Fishburne and Gillian Anderson come on as supporting cast members. Over just 39 episodes, Hannibal guides us onto the entrance ramp before the Silence of the Lambs highway, taking us through a wealth of pre-movie mystery, carnage, and sensation (season three—and in turn the show—ends with the conclusion of the Red Dragon storyline, which is the Silence prequel).
Hannibal ran on NBC, which practically doomed it from the start. Tonally and visually, the show was never a good fit, a house guest that made your skin crawl. The pilot alone is shockingly gory, and the program would become best known among fans for its succulent, tempting, ravenous cooking montages, when we’d often see Mads Mikkelsen slice, dice, stew, braise, carve, broil, and sauté human remains into the most indulgent-looking dishes you’ve seen this side of Chef’s Table. The first season was the munchiest B-movie you’d ever seen, the second season was a tongue-burning jolt in power and flavor, and the third season was as rich as a butter-seared steak (extra bloody). Critics loved it. Fans gorged on it. Then Hannibal was gone. Cancelled. The show’s anticipated fourth season—when we’d finally reach its interpretation of Silence of the Lambs—will never happen. It’s regretful, but at the same time almost certainly lucky, because over the course of 27 hours of runtime, Hannibal never misplaced a single garnish. It’s a flawless, seamless, spotless show. Its peaks are revelatory and its lows are merely small delights. There are few television series that can say the same.
Hannibal is flawless because it quite literally didn’t have time to make a misstep. There are no down seasons and there are no ill-conceived storylines. Every episode is compulsive and compelling. Every bite is balanced and surprising and fresh and exciting. It doesn’t overcook anything and it lets everything marinate just the right amount. The final dish is wonderfully executed television, but you have to wonder if the show’s early exit keeps it from having that slippery, intangible ‘perfect’ factor.
The season three finale of Hannibal is one of the finest episodes of television in the past five years. It’s entrancing, horrifying, and dramatically wrenching. It caps off the show’s best start-to-finish season, and, miraculously, it concludes the series in a way that leaves little loose ends and hang-ups. We’ve seen slapdash series finales come together in the face of premature cancellation before—HBO’s Deadwood, most notably—and Hannibal’s is the best of the bunch. Something this improvised and unexpected shouldn’t work so well. In the face of cutthroat network executives and ratings-rule-the-day broadcast strategies, the excellence of the episode is a creative triumph. Yet, we’re still faced with that ugly word—cancellation. Something about Hannibal still didn’t work. It’s hard to say what, but the lasting feeling is nonetheless incomplete.
Thus, the legacy of Hannibal is closer to that of a fine tasting menu than a fully-realized meal. The bites we had were exquisite, but we were forced to leave the table before we could call ourselves satisfied. We could come away talking about the delicate presentation or the increasingly complex flavors, but it was hard to ignore that our stomachs were still growling. For all of its finely-realized beauty, Hannibal wasn’t able to fill us up. In a landscape where the TV menu is sprawling and diverse, sometimes it’s more substantial to stick with your favorite comfort dish.
Hannibal offered a rich, artfully-prepared plate of food, but even if you wiped it clean, you still found yourself pulling through the drive-thru on the way home.