“The cast and crew of Hannibal are positively giddy to be welcoming Gillian to Season 3 as a series regular,” Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller told TVLine in an exclusive statement. “A striking presence on stage and screen, she brings wit, grace and intelligence to every role she embodies. Screenwriting is so much easier when you’re inspired by a great actor and Gillian has filled the Hannibal writers room with wonderful inspiration. I can’t wait for audiences to see her make a bigger meal out of the Cannibal than ever before.”

In addition to her role on the acclaimed NBC drama, Anderson has appeared on the likes of The X-Files, Crisis, and The Fall. Even with her promotion to a series regular on Hannibal, Anderson is still scheduled to head the second season of The Fall, where she plays a detective looking into a serial killer.

The third season of Hannibal will premiere sometime midseason on NBC.

Will you be watching the third season of Hannibal? Are you excited to have Bedelia playing a more prominent role in the show than she did in seasons one and two? What else would you like to see from season three, either in terms of character or plot?

The post Hannibal Season 3: Gillian Anderson Promoted to Series Regular appeared first on TVHackr.

“Bryan and his team are running on all creative cylinders once again and have delivered episodes full of intrigue, scares and surprises,” said Jennifer Salke, President, NBC Entertainment. “The show continues to astound us with its incredible aesthetic beauty and its amazingly talented cast.”

Before the season began, NBC indicated that both co-productions they ordered (Dracula, pirate drama Crossbones) would be sharing the post-Grimm timeslot on Fridays as a symbol of the network’s commitment to scripted programming and a way of using Grimm‘s audience to grow other (inexpensive) hits. With Hannibal airing in the slot for the remainder of the season, Crossbones will either be pushed to 8:00, considering that it’s family friendly content makes it a more ideal candidate for an earlier slot than Hannibal; used on a different day of the week during the season; or slotted for sometime during the summer, where NBC could use a big-tent type of scripted series.

From Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me), Hannibal stars Hugh Dancy as Dr. Will Graham, a criminal profiler who hires psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lector (Mads Mikkelsen) to help look into the minds of serial killers he helps the FBI investigate. However, soon enough, the two become more entangled than Graham could have ever anticipated. The series, based on Thomas Harris’ best-selling novels, is a prequel to the story that began with the feature films Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs.

In addition to Dancy and Mikkelsen, Hannibal stars the likes of Laurence Fishburne (CSI), Caroline Dhavernas (Wonderfalls), and Hettienne Park (The In-Betweens of Holly Malone). You can check out key art of the second season below.

What are you expecting from Hannibal’s second season? Where do you think the show goes following the events of the season finale? Is Hannibal going to be a good tonal match for Grimm?

The post Hannibal Season 2 to Premiere Friday, February 28th on NBC appeared first on TVHackr.

Hannibal is the youngest-skewing drama on ABC, CBS, and NBC, with a median age of 45.7, and attracts a more affluent audience than average, two big reasons why the show is returning in 2013-2014. Couple that with 75% growth in Live + Same Day ratings and the show, while not attracting a strong live audience, is a major win for NBC. Given the show’s cheaper licensing fee and genre-bent, it seems destined to air on Fridays at 10:00 alongside Grimm, seeing as how other international co-productions (Dracula, Crossbones) are already penciled in for the same slot. Moving Hannibal there would remove the ratings pressure that the Thursday slot brought, pair it with a similar lead-in that it could feed off of, and allow it to accumulate episodes and soak up more critical attention. Additionally, its presence keeps NBC’s drama presence strong and gives them the opportunity to focus on other hours of their schedule, the latter being more evident should Hannibal make the move to Fridays.

In addition to Mikkelsen and Dancy, Hannibal stars Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dharvernas, and Hettiene Park.

Hannibal airs Thursdays at 10:00 on NBC, with the season finale airing June 20th. You can check out NBC’s 2013 fall schedule here.

Where do you think Hannibal will be scheduled for its next season? Was the show a surprise for you, in terms of quality and how it managed to interpret the well-worn tale of Hannibal Lecter? Should NBC continue down the path of inexpensive international co-productions to fill schedule holes and garner acclaim?

The post Hannibal Renewed for Season 2 by NBC appeared first on TVHackr.

Hannibal fans will get clips of the fourth episode, though, set to debut on NBC.com next week. The package will focus primarily on character development rather than gore/scares or any of the procedural elements of Hannibal, with Fuller providing voiceovers and discussing the series.

This isn’t the first (and might not be the last) episode to have its airing compromised by the tragedy in Boston. ABC flipped the order of two Castle episodes, the one originally airing Monday having a storyline based around a bomb, while Revolution was pushed back a week for the same reason. Tonight, CBS has bumped Vegas from its regularly scheduled airing to Saturdays at 8:00, giving the 9:00 slot to a special centered around the latest developments in Boston. As a result of episode four being pulled, the Hannibal season finale has moved from June 27th to June 20th.

Hannibal airs Thursdays at 10:00 on NBC. The show, which climbed in the ratings following its well-received pilot, fell 18% in the ratings for its most recent episode.

Do you think that NBC made the right decision in pulling the episode? Should networks be more sensitive about the images they broadcast during times of tragedy? Where do you feel the line between sensitivity and censorship is?

The post NBC Pulls Next Week’s Episode of Hannibal appeared first on TVHackr.

What the hell?

Freddie Lounds, in a land she can only find in her nightmares, has started treading in the world of Hannibal and Will by posting Will’s story as a demented mind doing research on other demented minds. Funny thing is she’s just as demented as the rest of them. Climbing around crime scenes and finding clues, leaving behind evidence of her own that can only place her into compromising locations, making neither Lector nor Will Graham happy men – let alone the Feds. If she was as concerned about Will as she wrote she was, she’d be a bit more careful.

Will’s guilty conscience about saving Abagail Hobbs by killing her father has been eating him alive. He’s seeing her bather everywhere and sees living evidence of may other dead crime victims he comes across on a daily basis. It makes him feel just crazy enough to want to continue his relationship with the only man who is actually more crazy than he is – Hannibal Lector.

When Will shot the Mushroom Man, he told Will they all evolve from the same state. That by burying them and walking through a field they know they are there. If he had let Will bury Abagail Hobbs in a field she would finally have been able to reach back to Will like he wanted. These are some messed up stories from the mind of Bryan Fuller and Thomas Harris.

What’s interesting about it is between the two of them they can read each other better than any other person could every hope to. Hannibal says it’s beautiful in its own way, giving voice to things that matter. Did Will really feel so bad because killing Hobbs felt so good? Will realizes that killing Hobbs felt just, but shooting the Mushroom Man felt good, too. Graham admits it, but can’t truly accept it. He doesn’t want to equate killing or shooting the bad guys with being powerful, no matter how it feels in his mind.

The post Hannibal Review: “Amuse-Bouche” appeared first on TVHackr.

Hugh Dancy as Special Agent Will Graham is a standout. Although he has the title of Special Agent, he was never truly an FBI agent because he couldn’t make the cut. His mind, however, is capable of taking a crime scene and interlocking what happened with what is left in such a way that they would have been remiss to overlook him completely, thus the special status. It was an interesting dynamic to have a protagonist as mysterious as the antagonist, in this case, Hannibal Lector (Mads Mikkelsen), who we’ll get to shortly.

Very early in the hour Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) was asked to profile Will in the same way he would soon be asked to psychoanalyze the killer. She refused, stating the only way that would happen would be posthumously.

Of course, we all know the story of Hannibal Lector, the eater of people. Will determined quite quickly that whoever they were searching for was eating their victims and held some fascination, if not love, for the girls he was choosing. What he didn’t expect was for Agent Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) to seek out a well known psychoanalyst in his own right, Dr. Hannibal Lector, to do the same to Will that Will was doing for the killer.

Will’s somewhat strange and off-putting personality, something he considered anti-social and borderline autistic, kept him from being the superstar FBI agent we would recognize from the movies, and it’s also what caused the FBI to do research on him before setting him free onto the case.

Will is the kind of guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Riding along side the road and finding a stray dog, he spent ages trying to coax him into his car, not to harm him, but to bring him into his home and make him a part of his family. Hannibal, on the other hand, would probably use the same coaxing skills to bring a girl home as dinner. They share such similar personalities and ultra intelligence but they’re used for utterly opposing purposes.

Hannibal knowing who his copycat was gave the show a distinct The Following feel, and I seriously hope the show doesn’t take that route. I’ve found the confusion of extreme violence and frakked up love to be unwatchable, but in the first rundown with Will and Hannibal working together, there is something more sinister going on. The final scene when Hannibal was in the hospital with his golden ticket, perhaps the daughter he never had, the more interesting the story became.

Hannibal seems as though it will be an elaborate game of cat and mouse where we are never quite sure who is the cat and who is the mouse as so many characters exhibit qualities of both species. The hour was a great introduction to two incredibly deep and awkward personalities. I wouldn’t even call Lector evil at this point, because he seems more broken than anything else. It’s my hope that part of the series will be digging into exactly who he is and why, and how someone like Will would not only listen to him but learn from him, as well as why the FBI would be unable to see what is right under their noses.

I think it’s going to be a fun, if a bit gruesome ride. It will certainly make eating meals a bit challenging. Liver and onions anyone?

The post Hannibal 1.1″Aperitif” Review: The Golden Ticket appeared first on TVHackr.

Based on the series of novels from Thomas Harris, Hannibal was developed by Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies) and will feature 13 episodes in its first season. The show received a series order without going to pilot and will be occupying the Thursdays at 10:00 slot, a former place of prestige that has seen dramas like Awake, The Firm, Prime Suspect, and Do No Harm fail to draw an audience. With the recent success of The Following, will Hannibal manage to curb the Thursday night curse and find an audience for itself?

Hannibal stars Hugh Dancy (The Big C) as Agent Will Graham; Caroline Dhavernas (Wonderfalls) as psychology professor and consultant profiler Dr. Alana Bloom; Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) as Special Agent Jack Crawford, head of Behavioral Sciences at the FBI; Lara Jean Chorostecki (Please Kill Mr. Know It All) as tabloid blogger Freddie Lounds; and Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

The series premiere of Hannibal airs Thursday, April 4th at 10:00 on NBC.

Will you be watching Hannibal? How do you think the show will compare to the novels and movies about Dr. Lecter? Does the show stand a chance at getting a renewal in May?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagR6TItGts

The post Hannibal Preview: The Return of Dr. Lecter appeared first on TVHackr.