“Hannibal” series has seven-season arc, according to Bryan Fuller

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

I’m still not sold on the idea of a Hannibal Lecter TV show, but I’ll be damned if I’m not just a little bit curious to see how it will turn out. (Especially considering HARD CANDY helmer David Slade is directing the pilot.)

Bryan Fuller, the man in charge of NBC’s new “Hannibal” series, recently talked up the show with Entertainment Weekly, which will reinvent the Hannibal character as a sort of antihero crime fighter. (Although, to be fair, he did help take down some bad guys in his film incarnations.)

“It’s before he was incarcerated, so he’s more of a peacock,” Fuller tells EW.com. “There is a cheery disposition to our Hannibal. He’s not being telegraphed as a villain. If the audience didn’t know who he was, they wouldn’t see him coming. What we have is Alfred Hitchcock’s principle of suspense — show the audience the bomb under the table and let them sweat when it’s going to go boom. So the audience knows who Hannibal is so we don’t have to overplay his villainy. We get to subvert his legacy and give the audience twists and turns.”

“It really is a love story, for lack of a better description, between these two characters. As Hannibal has said [to Graham] in a couple of the movies, ‘You’re a lot more like me than you realize.’ We’ll get to the bottom of exactly what that means over the course of the first two seasons. But we’re taking our sweet precious time.”

He talks confidently about “the first two seasons,” and Fuller is apparently even better prepared than just that. He’s almost got a decade’s worth of Lechter shenanigans up his sleeve.

“Doing a cable model on network television gives us the opportunity not to dally in our storytelling because we have a lot of real estate to cover. I pitched a seven-season arc including stories from various [Thomas Harris] books.”

As a onetime writer on “Heroes,” it looks like Fuller realizes the importance of taking the long view with such a project. Now he just needs to find his Hannibal…

Clarice #2, Julianne Moore