Steely Dan might be reeling in the years, but most of us Fannibals are still reeling from the sting of having lost our favorite show about a cannibal and his best friend, a super troubled profiler. It’s strange to think that it’s been close to two full years since Hannibal last aired, after being cancelled by NBC. And now that creator Bryan Fuller is off running American Gods, it’s not as though he’ll have time to revive our favorite strain of Lecter/Graham fraternal flirtation someplace else, right? Well, not necessarily. A recent interview with Fuller keeps hope alive yet again.
Fuller was a guest on the excellent podcast Post Mortem with Mick Garris, where the writer, director, and producer talks to the biggest luminaries in horror and genre cinema (you can read my interview with Mr. Garris right here). It was a great conversation, and there’s quite a lot about Fuller’s history with Star Trek and of course American Gods, but it was the discussion about Hannibal that proved most intriguing…because a fourth season isn’t as dead as we might have thought.
“I have conversations with Martha DeLaurentiis,” Fuller revealed, “I have conversations with Mads [Mikkelsen] and Hugh [Dancy]; we’re all excited about the prospect of returning to the story. There’re some hurdles to get through. The rights revert back to Martha in September, I believe, and then it’s a matter of: do we do it with Gaumont? Which would be the only way to do it if we wanted to use those characters.”
Earlier in the interview, Fuller had mentioned how DeLaurentiis owned the rights to the Thomas Harris book Red Dragon, as well as the later books Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, but MGM owned the rights to The Silence of the Lambs–hence why the show was unable to use characters like Clarice and Buffalo Bill. I get the sense from the above quote that the French studio that co-produced the series are essential to getting Silence of the Lambs brought in to the TV fold.
Fuller did bring up a storyline that he wants to use in a possible season four that would solidify his stance on meat, be it human or animal. “There’s a whole storyline that I want to do with Katharine Isabelle’s character, Margot Verger, who now is the mother of the Verger heir and in control of the Verger meatpacking industry.” Fuller says he wants Verger to be like a Joan Crawford at Pepsi, take-no-crap type of spokesperson. I wanted her to… humanize all the Verger meatpacking plants and turn them over to PETA-approved [authority]. That would definitely be marbled through the season, Margot Verger taking down the meat industry as a hot, powerful lesbian.”
Come on, powers that be, just make Hannibal season four happen! Everybody wants it.
What do you think about Fuller’s statements? Let us know in the comments below!
Images: NBC
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
