Clarice's second episode shows it's even more set on being an indistinguishable CBS crime drama

The A.V. Club

"Even now, thirty years later, there’s a thrilling chill that seeps into the bones when watching Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs," says Alex McLevy. "The eerie unpredictability of the killer, the perfectly calibrated relationship between Jodie Foster’s young FBI cadet and Anthony Hopkins’ urbane monster, the highbrow execution of decidedly lowbrow material—it all works in tandem to create an unforgettable portrait of one of pop culture’s most indelible villains and the woman who beat the odds and successfully got to him. What a shame, then, to see the second episode of CBS’ Clarice toss all that rich source material out the window, with a story that could’ve easily replaced the names of its characters and thereby become indistinguishable from a dozen other CBS crime shows. Clarice seems to be signaling it has even less interest than the pilot in trying to maintain some fidelity to what makes these people interesting, or telling stories connected to that history. One can almost hear the studio executives explaining the situation to the creative team: It puts the CBS procedural framework on its skin or else it gets the hose again." ALSO: Clarice isn't so subtle: "It tells instead of shows, maybe because its visuals are consumed with the stylistic tics of network procedurals."