15 Reasons You Should Watch ‘Hannibal’ On Netflix

It’s a gruesome show about cops and killers, but also a tender love story about cops and killers

1. It’s a prequel to Silence of the Lambs but everybody is sexy. Stream it now.

2. Sensitive men! Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham is a fragile genius FBI agent who can think like a psychopath. He’s very vulnerable and brilliant and that’s why Hannibal wants to snuggle and/or smother him.

3. If you like beautiful and macabre fever-dream sequences then, wow, Hannibal is for you. There is at least one stunningly fucked-up visual per episode, and that’s a John DeVore Guarantee™.

4. I’m mad for Mads Mikkelsen. The hunky Danish actor’s Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter isn’t Anthony Hopkin’s campy, slow-moving middle-aged menace: he’s graceful and savage, cerebral but a real physical threat.

5. Bryan Fuller’s darkly erotic Hannibal isn’t better than Michael Mann’s sleek 1986 thriller Manhunter, which also introduces us to super FBI profiler Will Graham. Both Hannibal and Manhunter are excellent for different reasons, one hot and bloody, the other cold and bloodless. Manhunter also features the most underrated Lector: Succession’s Brian Cox. He’s a paunchy, smirking delight.

6. The murder scenes are pretty gag-worthy. This one still gives me nightmares: a serial killer buried his victims in shallow graves while they were still alive and then used their corpses to grow mushrooms.

7. The cast is STACKED: Lawrence Fishburne stars as Jack Crawford and he acts like the show is called “Crawford.” Broadway star Raúl Esparza is human slime as crooked shrink, Dr. Frederick Chilton. And when Gillian Anderson shows up? Phew. Unreal.

8. You’ll learn how to prep human lungs before pan-searing them.

9. My midlife crisis fantasy is living like Will Graham on a farm in Virginia with six rescue dogs. I am not a fragile genius who can think like a psychopath, though. Mostly, I’m just fragile.

10. I love whenever Scott Thompson shows up on Hannibal as a mordant crime scene investigator. He’s a member of the legendary absurdist TV sketch comedy group The Kids In The Hall, one of my primary comedy influences.

11. A tired old network like NBC took a risk on Hannibal. The show is dark and brooding and, at times, uncomfortable. But they stood by Fuller’s vision for three seasons, at least. There is no way a typical couch potato fan of basic af broadcast TV cop procedurals were ever going to like Hannibal. It’s like CSI, only make it Goth and Thick With Sexual Tension.

12. Here are some other epic gory death tableaus, written as a haiku: Antler shish kabob/body part totem pole/a human skin quilt

13. If you’re like me, you’ll eventually end up chanting “kiss! kiss! kiss!” every time Hannibal and Graham spend time together. But, you know, maybe you’re not like me?

14. I’m always happy to see comedian/actor Eddie Izzard. In Hannibal, he plays a rival serial killer who fails to get a leg up on Baltimore’s dapper cannibal.

15. Hannibal makes a subtle, but consistent, argument for eating people and/or going vegan.