Hannibal Season 2: 10 Reasons You Should Be Watching

9. It is The Best Entry In The Franchise Since "The Silence Of The Lambs"

Let's be honest with ourselves here: No matter how successful the individual entries are, the Hannibal Lecter novels have failed to create a franchise. When you look at every single film in this canon, they follow a very specific pattern (starting with The Silence of the Lambs) - Good, Terrible, Good, Terrible. And it was arguably the massive critical failure of Hannibal Rising that forced the series to lay dormant for the last seven years. But this TV series is doing what no entry in the film series has attempted to do - create a definitive narrative for Hannibal Lecter to live in. This goal is a tough one: Bryan Fuller has to deal with a series of Novels that slowly one by one became more and more insane (Mason Verger in "Hannibal" literally drinks children's tears!) and somehow find a way to smooth out the tonal inconsistencies between the subtle chills of Silence with the Gothic nuttiness of everything published since. But all that said, Hannibal season one is the first time in the history of this 23 year old series that they have managed to make Dr. Lecter an effective character outside of a prison cell.