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Hannibal - Cleaning Meat From the Bone
It’s decently hard to have any kind of category about television greats and not include The Leftovers in some way or another. The way it challenged television norms and still gave us a timeless mirror into the human condition is unparalleled. Despite the fact that every episode is a work of art, one of the most universally lauded scenes comes in the finale of the second season-- Kevin (Justin Theroux) stuck in purgatory, must sing ‘Homeward Bound’ as part of a spiritual karaoke to allow him to return back to his family. Yes, really. Everything about the scene is perfect-- from the sheer terror on Kevin’s face to the way that he can’t really sing but tries so hard--- there’s a reason the show has become emblematic of the potential for great television. The Leftovers is a big show about a lot of things, but in that moment when Kevin is on that stage, there’s only one thing that matters: he really, really wants to go home.The willingness of the show to treat that with the same respect as lets say, our meaning on earth or what happens when we die, is what sets it apart.
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Nothing says magic and pomp and circumstance quite like Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’, as demonstrated by magician extraordinaire Gob (or G.O.B) in Arrested Development. Do you like magic tricks? Well you’ve come to the wrong place. Do you like live performances that are 40% running around, 30% interpretative dance, 20% holding a knife between your teeth and 10% “magic”? Then you’ve come to the right place! Arguably one of the best running jokes in Arrested Development is Gob’s sheer lack of illusionary talent but nonetheless the banging soundtrack and sharp moves make up for the increasingly bizarre failures of his magical escapades.
‘Stars’ (Live at Montreux), Bojack Horseman
Bojack Horseman is well known for being not only a hilarious animated comedy but also a deeply poignant look at addiction, fame and bad people who do bad things but desperately want to be better. The first two seasons, while still possessing that same emotional depth that would make it such a beloved triumph in its later years, largely veer towards the more comedic tones, but the overall shift from “comedy” to “comedydrama” can be pinpointed to the finale of season 3. There’s a lot that leads up to this scene; a hilarious awards race, the break-up of Bojack and Princess Caroline’s working relationship and of course, the loss of a life. Completely broken down by his past actions (and his own compliance in his misery), Bojack drives his yellow ferrari down a desert road as Nina simone’s ‘stars’ plays. The pacing of the scene is pure gold, the montage that plays as he speeds up, the way he slowly lets go of the car, and the beautiful melancholy of Simone’s tenor serenading him through his breakdown makes watching hard but looking away even harder. It’s a beautiful end to a beautiful but dark season, and it’s the perfect set up for what will happen next in Bojacks’ saga.
‘Paradise Circus’, Luther
Luther follows the eponymous moody and brilliant London detective played by Idris Elba. It breaks the mold of dry British crime procedurals by offering a more thrilling, edgy, and cerebral experience. At the same time, it refrains from deploying much of the over the top spectacle seen in its popular contemporary, Sherlock. It’s rhythm is more subdued, cynical, and melancholic; broken up by tangential moments of action. The first 5 minutes of the series offers a window into the world of John Luther. We witness a tense moment of decision, violence, and moral ambiguity. The title sequence bleeds in. We hear the rhythmic snare drum and dreamlike vocals of Massive Attack’s ‘Paradise Circus’ whose lyrics reflect the troubling experience of the show’s antiheroic protagonist. “Love is like a sin, my love, for the ones who feel it the most.” As we see later in the series, Luther’s sense of duty conflicts directly with his underlying capacity to empathize with others. He feels insecure engaging in relationships and often overreacts as a result of his insecurity. His sense of duty and experiences of loss color his emotional connections with a shade of guilt. Closeness, therefore, evokes a sense of sinful anxiety because of its inherent opportunity cost and risk of further anguish.
Forever appearing on TV’s ‘gone too soon’ lists, NBC’s Hannibal ran for 3 seasons from 2013 through 2015. Across the show’s 39 episodes, showrunner Bryan Fuller brought everyone’s favourite fictional cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to the small screen as a character with charisma to spare and more intimate relationships with the various characters introduced in Thomas Harris’s first Hannibal Lecter novel, 1981’s Red Dragon. Bryan Fuller brought his version of the character (performed by the fantastic Mads Mikkelsen) through misadventures which would adapt 3 of Harris’s 4 Hannibal novels across its 3 season stay; these being Red Dragon in its entirety, along with elements of 1999’s Hannibal (hereafter referred to as H to avoid confusion), and 2006’s Hannibal Rising. Hannibal’s most overlooked merit was the show’s ability to take the many issues which plague both H and Hannibal Rising (both critically-panned novels) and adapt them into viscerally engaging television through artful omission and reconstruction of certain elements. These changes help to make Hannibal into a rare example of a television adaptation which vastly improves on its source material.
The greatest example of this superior adaptation comes with 1999’s H. Written after the success of the filmic adaptation of 1988’s Silence of the Lambs (the only Lecter novel not adapted by the show due to the licensing of certain characters) , H brought the titular doctor back after 11 years to appease a new wave of hungry fans, and yet managed to upset nearly all of them through a woeful turn in the relationship between the good doctor and Silence protagonist Clarice Starling. The novel’s final chapters see Clarice and Hannibal develop a shocking romantic and sexual relationship, one which undermines all of Clarice’s character development in moments as Harris has Hannibal manipulate Clarice through medication into falling for him. This problematic erasure of Clarice’s agency mixes with the novel’s horrific presentation of the lesbian character Margot Verger as a butch bodybuilder whose homosexuality is frustratingly traced in text to childhood sexual abuse, to create a hugely dissatisfying narrative. H is also riddled with a problem of hopping between protagonists, namely Starling and an Italian agent named Rinaldo Pazzi, thus creating a lack of room for interesting development in either character. Luckily, Fuller and crew had 14 years to dwell on these issues, and successfully remedied them in Hannibal’s second and third seasons.
Without a single mention of Clarice Starling, Hannibal instead focuses on the layered relationship between Lecter and Red Dragon Protagonist, FBI agent Will Graham. Graham is renowned for being able to get inside the minds of killers in order to solve cases, which makes him a perfect plaything for Lecter throughout the show. Their relationship carries the show through a constant stream of betrayals, upheavals, and psychological seductions. H’s central plot centers around a surviving victim of Lecter named Mason Verger who seeks revenge on Hannibal for deforming and paralysing him. Hannibal uses this conflict between Verger and Hannibal to further develop Graham and Lecter’s relationship as Graham becomes more and more complicit in Hannibal’s killings while the doctor evades Verger, testing Graham’s loyalties. Hannibal’s seduction of Will is gradual, taking place over two and a half seasons, leading to Graham’s alignment with Hannibal feeling much more earned and developed than the final act shocks of the novel which the show adapts in this arc. The fact that the show sticks with a single developed protagonist/ antagonist relationship instead of hopping between Graham/Starling/Pazzi/Lecter as the novels do results in Hannibal’s on-screen seduction of Will feeling much more emotionally resonant than any such relationship in the novels.
The show carefully combs through Harris’s novel, gaining a despicable villain in the pedophilic Mason Verger, and cleaning up the novel’s problematic treatment of its female and queer characters by reinventing Mason’s sister Margot as a believable queer woman with the agency and drive to take revenge on her brother without problematic origins ascribed to her sexuality, and by also replacing Clarice and Lecter’s last minute mysoginistic tangling into a more nuanced entanglement between the psychological cores of Lecter and Graham. While these changes already place Hannibal miles above Harris’s novel in terms of quality, it is Harris’s awful decision to demystify the character of Hannibal in this novel and in Rising through a derivative origin story which the show takes particular glee in upstaging.
