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What impresses me while reading the original novels is how good NBC Hannibal is a retelling.
There’s a sweet spot in retellings: enough references to the source material to justify basing it there, enough originality to justify retelling it. It's difficult to get right, and often separate from the work’s other merits—take as example Pamela Dean's Tam Lin: an engrossing, cozy narrative about coming of age and academia, with a Tam Lin ballad crammed into the closing act; the inspiration is great, the book itself is lovely, but the actual retelling feels clumsy.
NBC Hannibal occurs pre-Red Dragon but is more than happy to pervert canon; the characters are harvested from the book, but gleefully recast (gender and racial diversity, in my TV?) and fleshed out; later interactions between Will and Hannibal mimic interactions between Clarice and Hannibal in the third book; some lines appear verbatim, out of another character’s mouth; showstopping scenes (dat burning wheelchair) reoccur, enacted by different people with different results; and this is my favorite bit: Will’s house seems to be inspired by the house in which Harris wrote Red Dragon and, himself, discovered Hannibal.
So it has roots dug deep into the source material, but it’s also growing a metaphorical tree, a big old one. Some of what it has to say is questionable (the Hannibal/Clarice relationship becomes explicitly sexual; the same interactions recast as Hannibal/Will are not; meanwhile, when Bloom is recast as a woman, the Hannibal/Alana Bloom relationship is), but it is constantly, undeniably talkative. It’s more explicit than the source material, such that—
—becomes an entire season. It shares Harris’s psychological overlay, but takes a more sensual approach to Harris’s predilection for discomforting physicality. It does what Red Dragon fails to do, what Harris began to do in later books: it casts Hannibal central, because he and his effects are what is most fascinating, but it explores those effects with more intention and result than the books.
My entire time spent watching Hannibal is spent going, oh, this is good; this is pushing itself forward, challenging itself, and it’s constantly good. Good doesn't happen often. And I continue to be surprised to find it’s not just good in its own right, but also as a retelling. It’s all around, intentionally, well done. Now that’s super rare.
There’s a sweet spot in retellings: enough references to the source material to justify basing it there, enough originality to justify retelling it. It's difficult to get right, and often separate from the work’s other merits—take as example Pamela Dean's Tam Lin: an engrossing, cozy narrative about coming of age and academia, with a Tam Lin ballad crammed into the closing act; the inspiration is great, the book itself is lovely, but the actual retelling feels clumsy.
NBC Hannibal occurs pre-Red Dragon but is more than happy to pervert canon; the characters are harvested from the book, but gleefully recast (gender and racial diversity, in my TV?) and fleshed out; later interactions between Will and Hannibal mimic interactions between Clarice and Hannibal in the third book; some lines appear verbatim, out of another character’s mouth; showstopping scenes (dat burning wheelchair) reoccur, enacted by different people with different results; and this is my favorite bit: Will’s house seems to be inspired by the house in which Harris wrote Red Dragon and, himself, discovered Hannibal.
So it has roots dug deep into the source material, but it’s also growing a metaphorical tree, a big old one. Some of what it has to say is questionable (the Hannibal/Clarice relationship becomes explicitly sexual; the same interactions recast as Hannibal/Will are not; meanwhile, when Bloom is recast as a woman, the Hannibal/Alana Bloom relationship is), but it is constantly, undeniably talkative. It’s more explicit than the source material, such that—
"The reason you caught me is that we’re just alike," was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him.
—becomes an entire season. It shares Harris’s psychological overlay, but takes a more sensual approach to Harris’s predilection for discomforting physicality. It does what Red Dragon fails to do, what Harris began to do in later books: it casts Hannibal central, because he and his effects are what is most fascinating, but it explores those effects with more intention and result than the books.
My entire time spent watching Hannibal is spent going, oh, this is good; this is pushing itself forward, challenging itself, and it’s constantly good. Good doesn't happen often. And I continue to be surprised to find it’s not just good in its own right, but also as a retelling. It’s all around, intentionally, well done. Now that’s super rare.
