What pairs well with liver, fava beans, and a nice chianti? Present-day reboots of legacy movies. Jonathan Demme’s masterful and terrifying film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs was released in 1991, and its success still resonates today. Anchored by brilliant performances from Anthony Hopkins as imprisoned serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, the film is one of the only horror movies to win Best Picture and to be awarded in all top five categories at the Oscars.
Still considered one of the greatest movies ever, it’s ultimately set to get a new TV show set in its dark, crime-ridden world. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal—a gory and excellent prequel on NBC that boasted Mads Mikkelson as Dr. Lecter and Hugh Dancy as FBI agent Will Graham. That series hasn’t aired since it was canceled in 2015, so TV executives at CBS are giving it another shot, this time with a sequel that follows Clarice Starling starting in 1993, one year after the events of Silence of the Lambs. The show is, fittingly, called Clarice, and is coming from Star Trek writer and producer Alex Kurtzman and Rachel Getting Married writer Jenny Lumet.
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While a previous reboot following Starling failed to launch at Lifetime in 2012, CBS seems to be throwing the proper resources at this attempt. As Deadline reports, the show “will film a pilot before a series order decision is made but a writers room has already been set up, and there is a lot of enthusiasm for the title, the premise and the auspices at the network.”
Speaking of Hannibal, Bryan Fuller is still trying to save his long-canceled NBC show. He responded to the news of the Clarice story on Twitter, saying, “Martha & I tried many times to work with MGM to include Clarice into our Hannibal story. They ultimately told us they had their own plans for Clarice and they didn’t need Hannibal to tell her story. Don’t think this impacts a potential #HANNIBAL S4 as we never had Clarice rights.”
There have been no casting announcements so far, but the titular character should be one of the most coveted roles in the upcoming pilot season. Here’s hoping CBS doesn’t play it safe with a standard crime-of-the-week procedural and takes its source material to the weird, brooding places it deserves.
