CBS’ new Clarice TV series can’t mention Hannibal Lecter at all

CBS’ highly-anticipated new series Clarice will pick up just one year after the events of the iconic Thomas Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs, and the movie of the same name.

While the show is set so closely to that iconic story, it may come as a surprise that the show is essentially ‘banned’ from even mentioning Hannibal Lecter, the iconic killer played by Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins. 

Executive producer Alex Kurtzman, who co-created the series with Jenny Lumet, told Entertainment Weekly that a complicated rights issue essentially ‘banned’ the production from even mentioning the iconic killer’s name.

The rights to all of the characters in Thomas Harris’ novels are strangely split between MGM and The Dino De Laurentiis Company, which produced The Silence of the Lambs.

This new series will not be able to mention Lecter, who will still be ‘at large’ after the events in The Silence of the Lambs.

However, the show will feature a number of other characters from Harris’ novels, which weren’t featured in NBC’s Hannibal, including Clarice Starling (Rebecca Breeds), her colleague Ardelia Mapp (Devyn Tyler), Deputy Assistant Attorney General Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), the late serial killer Buffalo Bill (Simon Northwood) and others.

‘I’m still trying to understand how the rights are divided. But it’s been quite liberating because we have no interest in writing about Hannibal — not because we didn’t love the films and the show, but because it was done so well by so many people that it didn’t feel fresh for us,’ Kurtzman said.

The executive producer added that the first season won’t feature the title character on the hunt for a serial killer, since that would be too obvious.

Instead, there will be, ‘an entity that represents something that we deal with in our lives all the time.’

‘It’s a more expanded, nuanced, complicated, and topical version of a serial killer,’ Kurtzman added.

He added that they aren’t trying to ‘mirror’ the style of director Jonathan Demme from The Silence of the Lambs with this series.

‘We’re looking for not to repeat what Demme did, because I think the biggest mistake that we could make would be to mirror the style of that,’ the showrunner said.

‘We harness the spirit of it and ask, “What was he doing that was so meaningful and how do we interpret it now, 30 years later, for a modern audience?”‘ he added. 

The show will also explore the ‘white gaze’ through Starline’s colleague Ardelia Mapp (Devyn A. Tyler).

‘There was the male gaze in the movie, but baked into our scripts is the white gaze that Ardelia has to function under and navigate,’ series co-creator Jenny Lumet said.

‘There’s no “black best friend” thing going on here, that would be intolerable to us. We take a big bite into the relationship between a young black woman and a young white woman who are best friends, and have each other’s complete support, yet have never had the conversation about the differences in their lives – and Clarice has a lot of catching up to do,’ Lumet added.

Clarice debuts February 11 on CBS.