Over the course of the series, Graham was Lecter’s ultimate symbolic meal. Fuller’s choice to begin Hannibal at the start of the duo’s twisted friendship, with a pre-incarceration Lecter providing subtly poisonous advice to Graham while he investigated a number of twisted serial-killers-of-the-week, allowed for a bruising intimacy between them that built over time. The Lecter novels and films often had an unsettling relationship to characters outside the heterosexual norm. (See Silence of the Lambs's transgender serial killer Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb for a much-debated example.) Fuller, who is gay, took the peripheral otherness of Harris’s depiction of LGBT characters and made it the heart of the series. Even though Graham and Lecter have relationships with women throughout the show’s run, it is clear – at least from the early first season episode in which Hannibal intimately sniffs Will from behind – where their true yearnings lie.

“Is Hannibal in love with me?” Will asks the sociopathic psychiatrist Bedelia Du Maurier (a mesmerising Gillian Anderson) in the series’ penultimate episode, finally expressing the ache that he’s denied for so long. We might then turn that around and ask why so few viewers, beyond a bunch of effusive television critics and an impassioned cult of ‘Fannibals’, were in love with Hannibal? The series was a consistent underperformer in the ratings, yet the television network NBC withheld the axe until this year due to the praise it garnered, as well as the relatively cheap licensing fee they paid to air it. (The French studio Gaumont primarily financed the show.)

Not by ratings alone

We can only speculate as to the reasons the series didn’t connect beyond a cliquish few. Might it have been cinematographer James Hawkinson’s dreamily perverse visual style, which lingered with elation on the most horrifying tableaux? (A totem pole fashioned from bent and broken bodies could be given the same aesthetic weight as one of Hannibal’s innumerably savoury, and human-sourced, meals.) Was it the ever-evolving approach to storytelling that saw the show morph from a straight procedural in its first year to a psychological character study by its third? Fans of the early episodes were starkly divided by the most recent season’s slow-build European jaunt in which Will, even more emotionally damaged and psychically scattered than usual, hunted Hannibal on the continent. Had Fuller taken his self-described mandate, stated in several interviews, that he and his collaborators were knowingly making 'a pretentious art film' too far?