Maybe Hannibal will finally reach the audience it deserves now that it's on Netflix

The Ringer

NBC's 2013-15 psychological horror thriller should've had a long run had it found the right audience, says Alison Herman. "Created by Pushing Daisies’ Bryan Fuller, Hannibal is often a lurid montage of corpses turned into objets d’art: mounted on antlers, suspended on slides, turned into instruments, posed like an actual Botticelli," says Herman. "It even combines the sadistic procedural with another disheartening trope: the often-cynical use of IP, which has led to many misfires that swap recognition for innovation. (Remember when ABC made a TV show out of a time-traveling Jack the Ripper?) Hannibal took on nothing less than the most famous fictional serial killer of all time, conceived by writer Thomas Harris and immortalized by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. And yet the show turned out to be a Trojan horse—or rather, to quote one of its most famous lines, a social worker sewn inside of a horse. From 2013 to 2015, Hannibal told a humanist story about a sociopathic cannibal, using the structure of a network procedural to counter its worst impulses. No wonder it didn’t last very long. But now that it’s available to stream on Netflix, maybe the show will finally reach the audience it deserves." ALSO: Could Netflix order a Season 4 if Hannibal reruns are successful?