On Saturday night, the season and series finale of NBC’s “Hannibal” aired. Based on the show’s ratings, not many people knew this. Far more people know of Hannibal Lecter through Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal in the Academy Award-winning “The Silence of the Lambs,” and even more know Hannibal only as an icon whose human-eating villainy is unsurpassed. No matter how one knows of America’s favorite cannibal, however, the series finale of “Hannibal” is must-watch television, acting as the definitive product not just of an exemplary television series but of the entire legacy of Hannibal Lecter himself.
“Hannibal” can be easy television to watch, if that is your design. There are gorgeous, gothic landscapes, artful visuals and accompanying sound mixing that has featured both Bach and buzzards. Its finale works just as deliberately to sate the senses; its most memorable scene overlooks an eroding bluff and is scored to a song that sounds as if it came from a “James Bond” movie. It is beautiful, and, like having an old friend for dinner, it fills you up.
The skillful use of both action and comedy within also make it a show that is easy to enjoy. Fight scenes play out on the screen like highly choreographed dances, somehow graceful and suspenseful at once, while comedy serves to buffer between these tense moments. Yes, this serial killer show is funny, full of double entendres, metacommentary, attitude, and anachronisms (in the finale, for example, the murderous Dr. Lecter refers to a “mic drop”). The dark setting of the show is such that these winks of comedy rarely produce belly laughs but instead provide cackles.
Of course, as the show excels in providing the best visuals, sound, action, and comedy on television, it also succeeds in horror. Aficionados of gory, bloody horror movies will find a home here, which in the past has featured a totem pole of corpses and angel wings made out of skin.
Despite this graphic nature, “Hannibal”’s greatest contribution to television is not shock-value horror. Its greatest contribution is the ambitious manner it explored the dense thematic territory of good and evil, love and hate, family and identity—all conversations that characters begin, but even in the final episode leave the viewers to finish. In this way, the program is as enduring as “Breaking Bad” or “Mad Men.”
The show stars Mads Mikkelsen as the titular killer and Hugh Dancy as forensic analyst Will Graham. They are brilliant in their roles and made better by surrounding talent such as Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas and Gillian Anderson. Together with showrunner Bryan Fuller (“Pushing Daisies,” “Heroes”) they have created a show that will horrify and seduce you from its first moment all the way to its haunting last.
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