Hannibal – “Apéritif” (S1E1, 2013) Review
8/10
A man stands in a house where a family has been killed, closes his eyes, and a pendulum swings backward through the room until he’s the one holding the weapon. He describes it in first person. The show presents this as how he works.
The 8 is for a pilot that establishes an unusual method in its first ninety seconds and never explains it. The reconstruction device is the series, and the episode has the confidence to show instead of describe it.
This pilot grabs me from the pendulum onward.
It looks and sounds like a horror film that wandered onto network television by mistake, and Mads Mikkelsen’s Lecter is so polite and so flat that he frightens me more than any of the gore. I’d rate it higher if it had already shed the case-of-the-week scaffolding. The show does that later, just not here.
What holds it below a 9 is a procedural spine it hasn’t yet escaped. The case of the week structure is visible here in a way it won’t be by the end of the season.
The pilot also has to do a great deal of assembly. Jack, Alana, Beverly, Abigail and the central pair all arrive inside forty minutes, and some of those introductions are visibly compressed to make room.
The Reconstruction
Will Graham looks at a crime scene, the scene rewinds, and he performs the murder in first person while narrating it in the present tense.
That device is doing an enormous amount of work at once. It conveys the crime without a flashback to the victim, it establishes the character’s ability, and it shows the cost, because a man who can do this is placing himself inside somebody else repeatedly. The staging is precise. A pendulum of light sweeps the room, blood returns to bodies, objects reassemble, and the actor is alone in a space he’s filling with somebody else’s intention.
What it avoids is the alternative. Almost every procedural shows the murder in a flashback from an omniscient position. That supplies information and nothing else. This supplies information, character and a problem at the same time.
The pendulum also gives the series a recurring image with no explanation attached. It’s simply how the episode renders something happening inside Will, and nobody in the show ever refers to it. That restraint is sharp, and I’d point any writer tempted to have a character explain the trick straight at it.
Look for a method of conveying events that also characterizes the person conveying them and creates their central difficulty, because a device like that is worth building a whole work around. The reconstruction here carries exposition, characterization and theme in one recurring sequence.
Demonstrate before you explain. The audience sees this work before anybody discusses what Will can do. That means the explanation later lands as confirmation instead of as instruction. An ability with a cost is a character. An ability without one is a plot convenience.
Mikkelsen Is Not Doing Hopkins
The most consequential decision in the series is that Lecter isn’t a performance of menace at any point. Mads Mikkelsen plays him as somebody with excellent manners, a slightly formal accent, and an almost complete flatness underneath it. There’s no relish, no theatricality, and none of the enjoyment Hopkins brought to the part.
What that produces is a person the audience can’t read. Hopkins telegraphs intelligence and pleasure, and this version telegraphs nothing at all. That means every scene is a viewer trying to determine whether anything is happening.
The first meal is the demonstration, and it’s my favorite scene in the episode. He cooks, he serves, he describes the dish, and the episode declines to confirm or deny what the audience has already worked out. The restraint delights me. Most first episodes would have winked at the camera here, and this one keeps a perfectly straight face.
The audience knowing more than Will is the series’ central arrangement and it starts here. Every scene between them is a viewer watching a person they know is lying help somebody, for three seasons. That’s an enormous amount of tension to draw from one withheld fact.
It Looks Like Nothing Else on Network Television
The photography is heavily stylized. Shallow focus, enormous close-ups of food preparation, saturated color in a genre that had standardized on grey, and a sound design closer to a horror film than to a procedural.
The food sequences are the clearest example. Preparation is filmed as though for a cookery program, with the same reverence and the same lighting. That produces a joke the audience is complicit in.
The show stages the crime scenes as tableaux instead of as evidence. Bodies are arranged, lit and composed, and the series treats murder as a visual argument. That’s a decision that drew objections and is also the point.
The first case is the clearest version. A killer taking young women who resemble his daughter, arranged with care, and the horror of the episode is that the arrangement is legible as love by somebody sufficiently broken. None of this belonged on broadcast television in 2013 and the tension between the material and the slot is visible throughout. The series is constantly working around what it can’t show and finding more disturbing alternatives. Brian Reitzell’s score is the other half of it, and I think it’s the most unsettling music on network television. There’s almost no melody, a great deal of percussion and prepared instruments, and long stretches that work as sound design instead of as music. It keeps me on edge even in scenes where nobody is in any danger.
A constraint on what you can depict will produce better work than permission does. This series couldn’t show what a cable equivalent would have, and invented a visual language instead. Explicitness is the least interesting solution available and is always the first one reached for.
Beauty applied to horror implicates the viewer. If the images are attractive, the audience has to account for their own attention.
A tonal mismatch with your format can be an asset. This looks wrong for its slot and the wrongness is the identity.
Will Graham
Hugh Dancy plays him as somebody who’s continuously uncomfortable, avoids eye contact, teaches instead of works cases, and is manifestly not well. The lecture hall scenes establish it economically. He talks to a room without looking at anybody in it, describes a murder in detail while visibly elsewhere, and the students are watching a man they’re not certain should be standing in front of them.
The pilot is careful about the order of information. He’s established as unstable before he’s established as useful. That means the audience’s concern arrives before their admiration.
Jack Crawford is written as the problem instead of as a mentor. Laurence Fishburne plays him as somebody who knows exactly what using Will costs and does it anyway, with a stated justification about the people who will die otherwise. That justification is also correct. That’s what makes him difficult. Fishburne plays a man doing arithmetic he’s done before and will do again, and the series never suggests he’s wrong about the numbers.
The dog detail is the characterization that does the most. Will has seven strays, has taken in every one, and the episode gives this perhaps forty seconds with no comment attached. It works because it’s not explained. A man who can’t be near people and has collected seven animals that need him is a complete statement, and any line about why would reduce it.
Cancelled While Improving
Three seasons, thirty-nine episodes, canceled in 2015 after ratings that were never adequate for the slot it occupied.
The trajectory is unusual. Most series decline and this one got stranger and better, with the second season structured around an inversion and the third abandoning procedural form almost entirely.
That it existed at all is the interesting production fact. A network commissioned an expensive, slow, extremely violent art-horror series based on a literary property it could only partially license, and ran it for three years. The rights situation meant the series couldn’t use certain characters until late. That forced inventions that improved it.
Clarice Starling was unavailable throughout. That’s why the series built Abigail Hobbs, Alana Bloom and Bedelia Du Maurier instead, and I think all three suit this version of the Thomas Harris novels better than a borrowed character carrying forty years of audience expectation and at least two famous performances ever could.
The ending is also worth knowing about before starting. The final episode resolves the central relationship and leaves a larger situation open, and nothing has followed in a decade.
Rights restrictions and other external limits force invention, and the inventions are frequently better than what you were prevented from using. This applies to research gaps, legal constraints and anything else that closes an obvious door. A work that gets stranger as it continues is following its own logic instead of a formula. That usually costs audience and is usually the right decision.
Know how your series ends before recommending it. An unfinished work and a work with a conclusion are different offers to a reader.
Should you watch Hannibal S1E1?
Yes, and expect something closer to horror than to procedural. It gets an 8 from me because the pendulum, the Lecter with no relish in him and the food photographed with more care than most films give faces are all there in the first hour. The procedural bones and the rushed introductions are what hold it under a 9, and the season sheds the first of those as it goes.
