Hannibal – “Apéritif” (S1E1, 2013) Review

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 is the one holding the weapon. He describes it in first person. This is presented as how he works.

The 8 is for a pilot that establishes a specific and unusual method in its first ninety seconds and never explains it. The reconstruction device is the series, and the episode has the confidence to demonstrate instead of describe it.

What holds it below a 9 is a procedural spine it has not yet escaped. The case of the week structure is visible here in a way it will not 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 demonstrates 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 is 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, which supplies information and nothing else. This supplies information, character and a problem simultaneously.

The pendulum also gives the series a recurring image with no explanation attached. It is not a device Will has, it is how the episode renders something internal, and the show never once has a character refer to it.

Mikkelsen Is Not Doing Hopkins

The most consequential decision in the series is that Lecter is not 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 is no relish, no theatricality, and none of the enjoyment Hopkins brought to the part.

What that produces is a person the audience cannot read. Hopkins telegraphs intelligence and pleasure, and this version telegraphs nothing at all, which means every scene is a viewer trying to determine whether anything is happening.

The first meal is the demonstration. He cooks, he serves, he describes the dish, and the episode declines to confirm or deny what the audience has already worked out, which is an unusual amount of restraint for a first episode.

The audience knowing more than Will is the series’ central arrangement and it starts here. Every scene between them is a viewer watching somebody be helped by a person they know is lying, for three seasons, which is 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, which produces a joke the audience is complicit in.

The crime scenes are staged as tableaux instead of as evidence. Bodies are arranged, lit and composed, and the series treats murder as a visual argument, which is 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 a specific 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 cannot show and finding more disturbing alternatives.

Brian Reitzell’s score is the other half of it. Almost no melody, a great deal of percussion and prepared instruments, and long stretches that function as sound design instead of as music, which keeps the register permanently unsettled.

Will Graham

Hugh Dancy plays him as somebody who is 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 are not certain should be standing in front of them.

The pilot is careful about the order of information. He is established as unstable before he is established as useful, which 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, which is what makes him difficult. Fishburne plays a man doing arithmetic he has done before and will do again, and the series never suggests he is 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 is not explained. A man who cannot 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, cancelled 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 could not use certain characters until late, which forced inventions that improved it.

Clarice Starling was unavailable throughout, which is why the series built Abigail Hobbs, Alana Bloom and Bedelia Du Maurier instead, and all three are better suited to what this version is doing than a borrowed character carrying forty years of audience expectation and at least two famous performances behind her could ever have managed for this particular version of the Thomas Harris novels is doing.

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.

Should you watch Hannibal S1E1?

Yes, and expect something closer to horror than to procedural. A pilot that shows you how its protagonist works in ninety seconds and never explains it, a Lecter with no relish in him at all, and food photographed with more care than most films give faces.

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