Clearly, the people in charge of programming at NBC haven't been reading The Stranger lately (lazy!), or they wouldn't have gone and canceled Hannibal, as Buzzfeed just reported that they have. Sure, the Silence of the Lambs prequel/spin-off/reconfiguration was low-rated, and yes, it was deeply revolting on a species level, but it was also gorgeously made and brilliantly acted, and set a standard of perverse excellence unlikely ever to be matched by non-pay TV. And yet...
It has occurred to me many times that the biggest cultural change I've observed in my lifetime—including the legalization of gay marriage and marijuana, including the election of a black president—was the existence of a network TV show about a charismatic serial murderer who eats human flesh and organs, which he preps and cooks on camera in the style of an ad for the most expensive luxury gourmet restaurant in the world. The first three examples represent righteous inevitabilities, while Hannibal's aestheticized cannibalism marked a new level of behavioral depravity in an arena that spent about 50 years being the very definition of what is acceptable/palatable to the greatest number of people in the West. Prime-time network television broadcasting may have lost its sleeper hold on the American consciousness, but it remains a powerful avatar for what America's mainstream will look at, or not look away from, in the pursuit of distraction.
The fact that Hannibal didn't attract a very big audience could be proof that I was correct; this could be the market speaking up that even the ever-more-jaded America of today isn't quite ready for Must-See anthropophagy. (The previous candidate for Hannibal's dark throne was probably the super-fucked, dramatically irresistible Law and Order: SVU, but even that show's thematic obsession with rape and recurring visual normalization of murdered/grotesquely abused women are tame by comparison.)
Regardless, Maggie Serota's article got it right: This utterly captivating, genuinely disturbing program was about as transgressive as network TV has ever been. No wonder it was canceled. TV wasn't built for transgression.
Maybe Hulu will give it a second chance. Cannibalism is NBD on the internet.
