NBC’s ‘Hannibal’ Adds Talent to Cast!

Now I know I already bashed the entire show and concept of NBC’s Hannibal pretty badly last time, but it’d seem that things about it keep looking better and better the more I hear about it. The brilliant casting of Macklemore Mads Mikkelson as Dr. Lecter is great as I previously mentioned, but now the big news is about Gillian Anderson returning to TV after several years of being off the small screen. Gillian Anderson as you’ll no doubt remember, played FBI skeptic Agent Dana Scully on The X-Files. Now she’ll be coming back to TV for multiple episodes in the show, playing Dr. Lecter’s own therapist.

Gillian Anderson

[quote] In a multi-episode arc on the upcoming NBC drama, Anderson is going to play Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier — murderous psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s (Mads Mikkelsen) own therapist.

“Every therapist needs their own head examined and we are ecstatic that Gillian Anderson has chosen Hannibal to mark her return to American television after 10 years to portray Dr. Lecter’s personal psychiatrist,” Fuller said in a statement. “Her intelligence and sophistication, not to mention her pedigree of ground-breaking TV, make her the perfect actress to match wits and psychological manipulations with one of the greatest villains of pop culture. I couldn’t be more excited.”  [/quote]

Whoa whoa whoa, HOLD UP. That’s all find and dandy, yay X-Files whatever. The REAL news in that quote is the statement made by “Fuller” about the show. Which Fuller could that be? Well it’s Bryan Fuller, a name you may not recognize, but whose work you definitely will. He’s only the guy who made Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, the underrated Wonderfalls, and helped write the best parts of the first season of Heroes, aka the only good season actually worth watching.

Here he is pictured with a fox for some reason.

His pedigree alone has me interested in the show, even though it’s so drastically different from all of this other work in tone. Needless to say, the cast and creative team behind this show are certainly looking to be a home run, so maybe it’ll actually be really good? All I can say is that it’ll probably get canceled. Just like all of Bryan Fuller’s other shows.

In other casting news, Canadian comedy fans might recognize another name – The Kids in the Hall star Scott Thompson. Thompson will play Jimmy Price, the third member of the FBI crime scene investigation team headed by Laurence Fishburne’s Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI’s behavioral science unit.

Hannibal: Dr. Lector Now Coming to NBC! First Trailer for New Show…

Quick! What’s the weirdest, stupidest, most nonsensical idea for a network television drama you can think of? Is it a story about sub-trans-dimensional mice cross breeding with a race of intergalactic spiders in a horrifying plot to steal all of Earth’s cheese? No? Ok. Was it a watered down TV version of the infamously non-TV appropriate cannibal/murderer/insane character Hannibal Lector? Then BOY HAVE I GOT GREAT NEWS FOR YOU!

So let’s pretend for a minute that the idea isn’t inherently flawed, and instead focus on what could be good about this. Firstly, Mads Mikkelson as Hannibal Lector is pretty excellent casting, and anybody who’s seen the Pusher movies or Valhalla Rising knows the guy has the chops to pull off the role. The problem with that is it’ll inevitably create a terrible vacuum as he’ll be the only good thing about the show, and almost everything else will be awful. I mean, I don’t expect Laurence Fishburne to stay on the cast for long. If there was ever a character who reeked of “Shocking Surprise Death!” it’s him. The whole show seems like a doomed idea, because Hannibal just doesn’t seem suited for any sort of long form serialized medium, and especially the medium of network television. Will he suddenly just NOT be a cannibal? Or will they skirt around it with implications and whatnot? Furthermore, the whole thing looks like somebody saw Silence Of The Lambs, Red Dragon, Manhunter and Hannibal and said “MAKE IT A SHOW DAMMIT!”

Pictured: Macklemore.

On top of that I have a weird personal problem where I keep getting Mads Mikkelson mixed up with recent hip hop artist Macklemore. Well, not literally. I just got really drunk once and couldn’t say “Mads Mikkelson”, and kept slurring his name until “Macklemore” came out, and eventually I started insisting that Macklemore was actually an actor and was really good in Casino Royale. It annoyed everyone.