‘Hannibal’: Binge This Violent Ode to Male Sensitivity on Netflix

When I think about the three seasons of Hannibal that ran on NBC between 2013-2015, I think of the eye-popping murder tableaus, tense fight scenes, and Mads Mikkelsen‘s debonair take on Dr. Hannibal Lecter. However, I mainly think about how sensitive Hannibal let its male characters be. Even though Hannibal lured viewers in with promises of gore kills and nefarious serial killers, masculine emotion was really at the heart of the show. Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham’s (Hugh Dancy) relationship was more than a cat-and-mouse game; it was an excuse for two men to constantly talk about their feelings.

The show Hannibal was more than a thriller: it was a violent ode to masculine sensitivity. And as of today, Seasons 1-3 of Hannibal are streaming on Netflix.

Hannibal was created by Pushing Daisies alum Bryan Fuller as a modern and unique take on Hannibal Lecter’s backstory. Hannibal Lecter was created by writer Thomas Harris in the novel Red Dragon. That book, which has been adapted into the films Manhunter and (the way less metal or even technically good) Red Dragon, didn’t focus on Lecter as a main character. In fact, Lecter was just a scene-stealing side character whom the real protagonist, FBI profiler Will Graham, visited in prison. All we were told was that Will managed to capture the serial killer Lecter, but suffered both mental and physical injuries as a result. For Harris’s follow-up, The Silence of the Lambs, he introduced a young FBI trainee named Clarice Starling who would develop a new relationship with the incarcerated serial killer.

Fuller wanted Hannibal the show to delve into that untold Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham backstory. From the get-go, he was game to take big swings and even bigger liberties. Fuller fudged the timeline to give Lecter and Graham a more intense relationship in the months before Graham began to figure out something wasn’t quite right with this brilliant psychologist he had befriended. Stylistically, Fuller embraced the purple prose of Harris’s novels, using jewel tones, decadent design, and hyper-symphonic murder scenes to tell the story. However, one place where Fuller veered hard away from Harris’s original books was in terms of the cast’s diversity. The usually white Jack Crawford was played by Laurence Fishburne, the oft-mentioned Dr. Alan Bloom became Caroline Dhavernas’s Dr. Alana Bloom, and Lara Jean Chorostecki played a gender-bent version of tabloid reporter Freddie Lounds.

But honestly none of that was the most important addition that Fuller made to the Hannibal Lecter canon. While a surface read of the series suggests that its primary appeal was in over-the-top gore, all that was actually a cover for the intense emotional vulnerability granted to the male characters.

When we first meet Will Graham, he is a shattered version of himself. Instead of being presented as a bastion of masculinity fraying at the bits — as he is in Michael Mann’s phenomenal Manhunter — this Will Graham has the energy of a kicked puppy. (In fact, a key character trait is his devotion to a pack of adopted dogs.) The first thing we learn about him is that he is gifted with an intense form of empathy. While he attributes this to his imagination, the clinical explanation is that he falls on the spectrum, in his words, “closer to Asperger’s and autistics than narcissists and sociopaths.” What makes him special in the eyes of the FBI, though, is he can empathize with the latter, giving him almost preternatural insight into the mind of the killers the bureau is hunting.

Hannibal devotes as much to Will’s inner life as it does to its colorful murder investigations. In fact, Will’s imagination carries us through each and every crime scenes, simultaneously putting us through the mind of the killer, while also anchoring us in Will’s discomfort in his gifts. When Dr. Hannibal Lecter is eventually brought in — halfway through the show’s pilot — he’s there to buttress Will. Alana Bloom is concerned that the stress of the hunt might be too much for Will and she recommends Hannibal as a professional who can offer insight. From there, the two men become intertwined. Will opening up to Hannibal, while Hannibal plays his own game, hiding his own tracks, and those of the killers he sympathizes with.

While Netflix’s Mindhunter is obsessed with the psychology of serial killers and the FBI agents hunting them, Hannibal goes the extra step further and meditates on the raw emotions of these figures. Clinical conversations are often just pretext for characters to confess their feelings. Will describes himself as a raw nerve, Hannibal is allowed to be more complex than a stylish sociopath, and even Jack Crawford’s backstory includes his grief over his dying wife. In fact, Fuller seems almost less interested in the serial killer chase than he is in giving his male characters scenes to chew on their emotions. It’s almost like he’s got to make the murder scenes look interesting to make them more intriguing the sight of grown men being sensitive as fuck in the early 2010s.

Hannibal is a thrilling ride and a blood-soaked descent into the minds of murderers, but it’s also one of the few shows I can think of where its male protagonists are allowed to show emotion. In fact, most of the drama stems from their bottled up emotions bubbling to the surface like blood to a wound. Dark, heady, but sensitive to the extreme, there’s never been another show quite like Hannibal.

Hannibal Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Netflix. 

Where to stream Hannibal