Reflexively turning the ordinary into the alien and vice versa, “Hannibal” has a formal ambition that is rare for television.  Illustration by Martin Ansin

I stopped watching “Hannibal” in Season 1, after a corpse was carved into a cello, its vocal cords splayed like strings, then “played.”  I stopped watching again when Dr. Frederick Chilton, played by the redoubtable Raúl Esparza, got his guts tugged out of his abdomen, like red-sauced linguini, while he was still conscious.  I stopped watching when an acupuncturist drove a needle through an eyeball, and again when a man’s leg was roasted and fed to him.  Each time, the decision felt like a sane and, maybe, ethical position.  Enough nihilism, enough torture, I thought.  Enough serial killers glamorized as artists and geniuses. 

But that righteous high never lasted.  I kept sneaking back, peeking through my fingers—a glimpse here, a binge there—either numbing myself or, depending on one’s perspective, properly sensitizing myself.  Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the darkness.  By midway through Season 2, “Hannibal” felt less like a blood-soaked ordeal than like a macabre masterpiece, pure pleasure and audacity.  With hints of David Cronenberg and Michael Mann, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, it has a formal ambition that is rare for television.  It reflexively turns the ordinary into the alien and vice versa.  Corpses pile onto a nightmarish totem pole; bees pour out of eye sockets; men swallow songbirds whole.  Over time, patterns emerge, revealing an uneasy meditation on intimacy, the vulnerability of the human body, and the power of art—its ability to make us crave something we thought we’d find disgusting. 

It’s possible, of course, that I love the show because it confirms my worst suspicions about food culture.  For those who haven’t seen “The Silence of the Lambs” or read Thomas Harris’s novels, from which the story is adapted, the basic plot is this: Hannibal Lecter, played with waxwork hauteur by Mads Mikkelsen, is a brilliant psychiatrist who commits hideous murders.  He takes “trophies” from the bodies—a liver here, a heart there—then cooks and serves them to unwitting guests. ( Most episodes feature dazzling cooking montages, notorious for making viewers hungry, then making them feel guilty.)  His justification is that he “eats the rude,” like David Chang, but with slightly less rigid ethical boundaries.  Hannibal is quite a catch: he plays the harpsichord and the theremin, he’s a natty dresser, and he knows his Dante.  By day, he’s a libertarian life coach for his patients’ Jungian shadows, often manipulating lesser serial killers into covering his tracks—in this universe, as on “Dexter,” serial killers are as common as daisies. 

Hannibal’s opposite number—his love interest, basically—is the tetchy, delicate Will Graham.  Played by the sad-eyed Hugh Dancy, Will is a criminal profiler for the F.B.I. whose pathological empathy is far more crippling than Hannibal’s lack of the stuff.  When he visits a murder scene, he enters a fugue state and becomes the killer, imagining the crime while murmuring the show’s mantra: “This is my design.”  The two men circle each other seductively—best friends and homoerotic nemeses, client and therapist—each getting inside the other’s head, sometimes literally.  Last season ended with Hannibal gutting Will with a kitchen knife after stroking his cheek—a moment of symbolic penetration that sent the show’s fans, self-proclaimed Fannibals, into raptures.  This season, the third, Hannibal gave Will, who survived, a valentine: a man’s corpse that he had pulverized, then sculpted into the shape of a human heart and displayed in a church, like a holy relic. 

None of this is treated even mildly realistically, and yet it’s not exactly camp, either.  As the show’s creator, Bryan Fuller (the wizard behind the dreamlike “Wonderfalls” and “Pushing Daisies”), has suggested, “Hannibal” is a show that regards spectacle with a sort of worship.  When “Hannibal” began, it mimicked the structures of network cop procedurals, but the show has long since shed that carapace, not unlike the way Hannibal shrugs off what he calls his “person suit,” the demeanor that lets him pass for normal.  In a recent interview on RogerEbert.com, Fuller explained that, when he hires directors for the series, he tells them, “This is not an episode of television.  This is a pretentious art film.”  His willingness to risk looking outré and avant-garde (on NBC, of all places!)  is part of a larger trend on television, inflecting series that range from “American Horror Story” to “True Detective,” “The Leftovers,” “The Returned,” “The Strain,” and “The Knick.”  Some of these shows are better than others, but they all live and die by their devotion to that old Freudian concept of “the uncanny.”  Among that company, “Hannibal” stands out for its ability to risk absurdity and self-seriousness, only to emerge with something gloriously strange and profound, in the realm of opera and poetry.  When Will examines that heart sculpture, for instance, it folds open, ventricles falling to the floor, and then walks toward him on twisted, black, nightmare legs, transforming into a demonic elk. 

And, despite the gore, there’s a disarming fairy-tale quality to the world of “Hannibal,” in part because the murders, with few exceptions, lack the misogynistic underpinnings of real-life serial killings, or even the snappy kink of Harris’s books.  No one is raped on “Hannibal,” even in a fantasy; instead, the victims get repurposed as mushroom farms.  When female characters get hurt—whether they’re shot or shoved out a window or, in one case, sliced finely, like garlic—there’s little gendered sadism to the act.  Graphic sexual violence isn’t inevitably exploitative; sometimes it’s a welcome force for realism.  But, in the arms race of suffering on television, “Hannibal” ’s elision works as a small, idealistic promise to viewers: while anything can happen, that one thing won’t. 

Murder, on the other hand, is up for grabs—and treated with brazen disrespect.  On “Hannibal,” corpses are fungible art supplies, like clay or oil paint, in sequences in which bodies are stitched into frescoes or twisted into grotesque displays.  Skin is stretched into wings, corpses are bent into apiaries, belladonna is planted in heart cavities.  It would be easy to see such choices through a cynical lens, as shock effects: Nietzsche is peachy, but sicker is quicker.  It certainly makes the show a tough one to recommend to strangers.  But these images coalesce into metaphors for mortality and loss.  A teacup breaks and then comes back together; we see that it’s like a skull shattering, which in turn reflects a grieving man’s wish for time to go backward.  Tears are stirred into Martinis.  A woman’s corpse is sewn into a horse’s womb, and after she’s cut out the doctors feel a heartbeat in her torso; they slice her open and a live blackbird flies out.  Symbols overlap eerily, as senses do in synesthesia: a heartbeat is a clock tick is a drumbeat.  The arch dialogue has the same multiplicity, with ordinary idioms taking on sinister resonance, from “the one that got away” to “the devil you know.” “ You smoked me in thyme,” one victim remarks, as he’s served a dish of himself, with typically shrewd double meaning. 

In one of last season’s most spectacular scenarios, a black male corpse is discovered in the river, coated in resin.  The man had escaped from an art project built by a serial killer Hannibal had never met: he’d torn himself out of a mural comprising dozens of corpses, of varying skin tones—racial diversity reinterpreted as pigment, people reduced to brushstrokes.  When Hannibal climbs a ladder to the top of a corn silo, he looks down and sees a pattern: from above, the curled bodies form an eye.  The image suggests outrageous ideas: one eye gazing at another, God at his creation, his creation back at God, through the open pupil of the building’s roof.  Hannibal calls down to the killer, “I love your work.”