'Hannibal' trailer, starring Hugh Dancy

“He catches insane men because he can think like them.”

In the first full-length trailer for NBC’s Hannibal, one FBI agent says that to another — but do they mean Dr. Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) or “special investigator” Will Graham (Hugh Dancy)? To be fair, most of what we see the doctor do in this footage is sip wine and offer counsel. Graham seems to be the nutty one.

This is by far the longest preview the network has released in advance of the show’s April 4 premiere, and while we get almost no new plot information (Graham is still a brilliant but troubled tracker of crazed men; Lecter is still poised to be his confidante and colleague), we do get a look at just how violent Hannibal may be.

And it is very violent: throats slashed, arms hacked, and women (always women) screaming. In fact, this newest video makes as much room for stylized slaughter as for anything else. This feels like an escalation of the trend pinned to the successful debut of Fox’s nightmarish The Following a few months ago — and it raises similar questions about the moral weight, not to mention aesthetic value, of fictional depravity. I’m still all kinds of excited… and at least now a few kinds of worried.

Watch and judge for yourself.

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