The highly popular NBC series, Hannibal had its fans by the hook as the leads danced around each other in the eternal will-they-won’t-they plot. What began as a tense yet paced story of a cat and mouse game accelerated into a bloody crescendo until the right and wrong blended into a morally grey genre. To begin with, the subject of morality in Hannibal has never been up for debate. But what Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy brought to the screen extended beyond those binaries.
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The Underappreciated Genius of NBC’s Hannibal (2013-15)
Hannibal tells the story of Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) before his capture and eventual escape in the Anthony Hopkins film. Serving as a prequel to the award-winning Silence of the Lambs, the series follows the calm before the storm as Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist with a taste for the criminal minded becomes enmeshed in the game alongside FBI Profiler, Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). Their story then follows an arc of repressed violent tendencies and the undercurrent of something akin to a twisted non-platonic relationship between the leads.
After its short three-season stint at the network and its entirely unwarranted end, the Hannibal cast, crew, and fanbase still await their return for a Season 4. The series had suffered the same fate as the other popular devil on the screen, Lucifer during its time on television. However, after the deluge of outcries and petitions, Netflix picked up Lucifer‘s story to give it a successful run at the streaming platform. If the trend were to follow, perhaps the clamoring of the fanbase could bring back the cannibalistic series, too, at some point in the future.
Hannibal Showrunner Shares Season 4 Vision Board
Hannibal Season 4, according to Bryan Fuller, the showrunner, would focus on a lot of tropes, but mostly center around the stories of the two wives caught in their husbands’ game. While bringing Margot Verger and Alana Bloom to the forefront delivers an even more intrinsically woven plot, it does not diminish the arc of the series leads. Mikkelsen and Dancy’s characters would resume their relationship years after the events of the Season 3 finale.
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Although this leaves an array of open plots and unanswered questions, it also allows the series to consequentially delve deeper into the narrative to bring out the transformative changes that finally lead to the Hannibal of Anthony Hopkins era. Bryan Fuller claims,
“We are ready and willing to go. I talk to Mads Mikkelsen fairly regularly and Hugh Dancy fairly regularly, so they’re both dying to come back and you know, it’s not just about the murder husbands, it’s about the murder wives. Katharine Isabelle and Caroline Dhavernas are just as big in the story of season 4 as Hannibal and Will. So, I hope we get the chance to do it. I’m not looking at my watch because I figure we’ll pick up the story whenever we do and I haven’t given up hope.”
However, it remains to be seen, if, without the active involvement of the series leads and fandom’s demands, the network will be willing to bring them back at all. Given the fact that Mads Mikkelsen has garnered an even more popular status in Hollywood with his run in MCU and the Fantastic Beasts franchise, it will be profitable for NBC to draw in the separate fandoms with the much-anticipated series revival.
With a 92% RT critic rating, Hannibal is currently available for streaming on Prime Video.
Source: Screen Realm
