HD Highlight: Hannibal (Season Two Premiere)

Hannibal: TV3, 11.20 Sunday

Here’s a handful of reviews to whet your appetite for tonight’s return, which Variety recommended for “the clever use of a bracing season-opening sequence that frames essentially everything to come as an extended flashback.” Gushed  TV Guide: “Hannibal, in its second season, is a feast of macabre freakishness, going beyond the realm of guilty pleasure in a sustained nightmare of horrific yet elegantly hypnotic design.” New York magazine was just as effusive: “You could say it’s as close as a broadcast network has gotten to the personal artistry of the best premium-cable shows, if it weren’t bolder and more elegant than anything on pay cable right now. The show’s greatest asset is its mastery of tone, a quality most shows don’t have the time or inclination to get right. Hannibal’s formal daring is never empty showmanship; it’s always in service of making the whole series feel like an endless lucid nightmare.” The Los Angeles Times dubbed this course “tastier than the last … With everyone now mostly on the same page as the audience, Hannibal can dispense with all the twitchy winks and nods to the franchise and focus on a real psychological drama — two brilliant predators fighting for survival.”