Mass shootings and real-life violence are not new; but after the murders in Aurora, Colorado, last summer and the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December, there is a perceptible revulsion toward certain displays of violence and gore in entertainment that feels like a change. Perhaps it's temporary; it's certainly random. If critics hoped that Fox's The Following "might be misjudging the mood of the country," as Tim Goodman wrote in his review in The Hollywood Reporter when describing the upsetting serial-killer drama, they were wrong: The show went on to be one of the hits of the new TV season.

Hannibal, though, NBC's highly anticipated TV serialization of the story of Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), has suffered a different fate: It had one episode pulled for content, and the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City has decided to stop airing the show entirely. The program's ratings have been weak. And now, though NBC has announced its schedule and pickups for next season, Hannibal, which premiered in early April, is in a limbo period, awaiting news.

Executive producer Bryan Fuller — who created Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies, among other work — developed Hannibal for television. His show is both violent and gory: The killings Graham investigates have resulted in some truly gruesome images on network television (naked young women impaled on antlers, mushrooms growing out of bodies, lots of blood, Graham reaching into a body, Hannibal's persistent gourmet cannibalism, and more). I've included a few pictures below, and if you're squeamish, you shouldn't read this story.

But if one concern of those who criticize violence in entertainment is that it's done thoughtlessly and exploitatively — as in The Following — that should not apply to Hannibal. Nor to Fuller, who has considered all of these questions. Hannibal, in fact, is so heavy with dread and sadness and the consequences violent deaths have on everyone, including and perhaps especially on law enforcement, as manifested in the tormented Graham, that it can be challenging to watch for that reason.

I talked with Fuller recently about Hannibal and violence.

I want to ask about the level of gore and violence on Hannibal. Let's start at the beginning when you first starting thinking about the show. How did you figure out its tone?

Bryan Fuller: What was always interesting about Thomas Harris' books is they were a wonderful hybridization of a crime thriller and a horror movie. So I felt like we had to be true to that. Because Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter and Red Dragon have a certain pedigree of crime horror/thriller, in order to be true to that genre, we had to have a certain amount of graphic content to honor the source material, and also honor the expectations of the audience who are approaching the material realizing this is a horror icon. If we didn't have certain ingredients for that dish, then it really wouldn't be that dish.

What did you think were the keys there?

BF: Well, what was always fascinating with the villains of Thomas Harris' books is they have this purple, operatic quality to them. They were also strikingly visual and cinematic. I think it was always our goal to honor the source material, because as a fan of the Thomas Harris books — I read Red Dragon in high school — I wanted to make sure that the loyalist in me and the loyalists out there were being delivered what they were being promised in calling the show Hannibal.