Bryan Fuller's Seven Season Plan for "Hannibal"

By Steven Lloyd Wilson | Industry | June 20, 2013 |

“Hannibal” is one of the best shows on television. It’s also one of the lowest rated to survive on a network. We’ve been here before, and know where it generally ends. But then “Community” somehow got another season from NBC too, so who knows how this industry works at this point. There have been some calls for one of the cable networks to step in, maybe HBO in some sort of dream world, to give the show a home where it would fit more.

It seems that Bryan Fuller is not satisfied with getting another season for wrap up. He’s giving interviews and going for the big claims to light up interest in audiences and new networks alike:

“Well, when you get into season four, you get into the literature. And so season four would be Red Dragon, Season Five would be the Silence of the Lambs era, season six would be the Hannibal era, and then Season Seven would be a resolve to the ending of that book. Hannibal ends on a cliffhanger. Hannibal Lecter has bonded with Clarice Starling and brainwashed her and they are now quasi-lovers and off as fugitives, and so that’s a cliffhanger. It might be interesting to resolve that in some way and to bring Will Graham back into the picture. So once we get two more seasons, say, of the television show, those are the aren’t-novelized stories, and then we would get into expansions of the novels after that and kind of using the novels as a backbone for season arcs that would then be kind of enhanced… [I]t would be about incorporating [Will] in a way that he hasn’t been incorporated in the books, because Will Graham was only mentioned in Silence of the Lambs, he was not seen, and so I would be curious to see what happens to Will Graham after Red Dragon. By the time of Red Dragon, he’s married to Molly and has her son from a previous marriage, but doesn’t have any children of his own. And then that relationship is more complicated by Francis Dolarhyde and there were suggestions that there was a not-so-happy ending for Will Graham after Red Dragon because he has his face carved up and you wonder what’s going to happen to Will now, and I’m curious to see what happens to Will after that.”



Seven years? Even Stalin only made his plans five years at a time, and he had nukes.

I don’t know how I feel about having it laid out like this either. I have been enamored by the uniqueness of Fuller’s approach, and hesitate to see it pinned up on a wall with the blueprints of a series of books and movies that I didn’t particularly enjoy. But then, that’s what I said before the series started, so for now at least, in Fuller I trust.

Steven Lloyd Wilson is the sci-fi and history editor. You can email him here or follow him on Twitter.

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