On making a deal with Hannibal Lecter in suburban Minnesota (preview)

This is 26 Episodes, a biweekly series tracing the history of television in the 21st century via episodes that made the medium great. The episodes are arranged chronologically, from 2000 to 2025, and they're chosen by me, Emily St. James. This is not a "best episodes of the century" list, but every episode I write about is one worth watching in my opinion.

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If you were going to pick the best episode of Hannibal — hell, if you were going to pick the best episode of Hannibal Season 1 — you probably wouldn't land on "Potage," which is a solid hour of television held back by the usual "this is Episode 3 of a wildly ambitious show, and the seams still show a little bit" limitations.

For starters, it is visibly putting pieces in place for the story to follow in a way that sometimes clangs. The show's eerie, unsettling atmospherics are more suggestion than practice at this point, though there are scenes where everything clicks in. Some of the performers are still feeling out where the characters should live in their bodies. As an example, there is a stillness to Hannibal that Mads Mikkelson doesn't quite have figured out yet, though, granted, this is me reading where I know the series goes onto an early episode. There are distractingly flat guest performers and a few scenes that work too hard to pull subtext into text so the audience doesn't miss anything. At times, the commitment to embracing the darkness verges on comical.

It is not a bad episode of television by any means, but when I initially wrote down a list of Hannibal episodes to consider writing about for this feature, "Potage" wasn't on it. Surely the bloody operatics of the Season 2 finale? Or the suffocating horrors of the late Season 1 episodes where the trap Hannibal has set for Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) becomes obvious? I might even have looked to one of the Red Dragon episodes from Season 3, which I remember being a strong if somewhat superfluous adaptation of that oft-adapted book.

But then I realized I didn't want to write about Hannibal Lecter or Will Graham, compelling as they are. No, I wanted to write about Abigail Hobbs. And that means writing about "Potage."

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