“This is my design.” –Will Graham

Hannibal is a beautiful show. Gorgeous. Lovingly presented and shot, smoothly directed and edited, full of cool blues and warm reds. Lots and lots of warm reds.

Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is a criminal profiler for the FBI with the uncanny ability to get inside the minds of serial killers and actually feel what they feel. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) is the psychiatrist who is asked to help Will deal with his mental issues as he explores the darker side of these crimes.

Spoiler alert: Hannibal Lecter is also a brutal killer. And a cannibal. And an erudite, extremely intelligent manipulator.  So there’s that.

Meat, meat, good to eat.

When we first meet Will, he is, to not put too fine a point on it, nuts.  His ability to find killers by getting inside their minds has driven him to the edge. And over. It doesn’t help that Lecter, the man hired to help him, toys with him instead, playing some horrific mind games on Will (and everyone else, really).

To say much more would be to seriously spoil the fun. And, make no mistake, while it is a violent and bloody show, filled with mutilated corpses and dissected body parts, it is still loads of fun.

Bryan Fuller and his crew have done an amazing thing: they have taken a character and story that we all thought we knew so very well (and, if truth be told, I personally thought had very little mileage left in it) and created one of the most engrossing, fascinating, intelligent (and, yes, gory) shows I have ever seen.

Every single scene of this television show is pretty as a postcard (if you’re into postcards that feature 20-foot-tall totem poles made from human bodies). The camera lovingly lingers over every delicately sliced section of meat, every sizzle of the skillet, every antlered man-stag (uh…yeah).

Strange hallucinations of antlers abound.

The first season takes its deliberate time, and that’s mostly a good thing. We already know some of Lecter’s story arc, and the rest of the characters don’t, so a lot of tension is created as we wait on the edge of our seats for him to tip his hand and slip off his mask. And boy does he ever.

Season 1 almost became a “Serial Killer Of The Week” show, featuring different killers in each of a number of episodes and not focusing as much as it could have on the drive behind Lecter and Graham as they butt heads and psyches (my friends and I often joked that anybody actually living in that town would be packing up and moving immediately)–but Hannibal had better long-range goals than I gave it credit for, and by the time that first season wrapped up, it had redeemed itself and I was…er…hungry for more. (sorry)

Season 2 turned out to be an all-you-can-eat buffet of depravity, dementia, and deliciousness, in which the cast and crew more than fulfilled the promise of the first episodes.  As we get deeper and deeper into the madness, and closer and closer to Lecter’s true nature, alliances are formed, broken, and formed again, the circle tightens, the focus sharpens, and all hell breaks loose.

Season 2 left me breathless and exhausted. I can’t wait for Season 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kN7fhWnhdM

Season 3 of Hannibal begins June 4, 2015, on NBC.  Uncle Mike sez: check it out. And don’t ask for a doggy bag.