20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About Hannibal
2. They're Not Allowed To Reference Silence Of The Lambs
Part of the fun of Hannibal is seeing how it fits into the existing franchise, both the best-selling Thomas Harris books and the film adaptations with Anthony Hopkins (even if both went off the boil a little with prequel Hannibal Rising). Characters, plot lines and more from those are used in the TV series to flesh out the world a little.
Surprisingly, though, there is little mention of anything connected to arguably the most famous book and film in the series, Silence Of The Lambs. That's because the show is tied up with the other films in the series, while as the Oscar-winning Lambs was the only one of the adaptations that wasn't produced by Dino De Laurentiis.
That means that Clarice Starling is probably off the table in terms of ever appearing in the series (if indeed it gets picked up elsewhere after NBC cancelled it), Buffalo Bill is unlikely to get a look-in (not that he'd be able to do his whole tucking trick), and basically the most famous Hannibal story doesn't exist in the Hannibal TV universe. For legal reasons.