Open Letter to Television: ‘Hannibal’ Is the Design We Deserve
"If everything that can happen happens, then you can never really do the wrong thing," Will Graham's hallucination of Abigail told him in the Italian cathedral where her former captor had mutilated a body into the shape of a human heart. "You're just doing what you're supposed to." Will Graham ends up agreeing with himself and dispenses with the Abigail vision all together, which makes sense in the kitchen-sink style of pop psychology Bryan Fuller's flawed masterpiece of a show, Hannibal, loves to traffic in. Now in it's third season, the show is more beautiful, more chimerical, more heteroclitic than anything you'll find anywhere else on television. Visually it was far more impressive in its baroque grotesquerie than True Detective, a show with the same level of pseudo-intellectualism but way more prestigious buzz surrounding it. And yes, I know that I was part of the problem. Don't think I'm not manifesting my own Abigail Hobbs out of guilt for even indirectly having to do with its fate now dangling in the air like a fish-hooked angel corpse.
