Hannibal will tell the early backstory of the infamous serial killer and is planned to span seven seasons.
According to EW, creator Bryan Fuller is taking five pages from Thomas Harris' Red Dragon and stretching that into the first two seasons of the drama which he has said is planned for a seven season story that would see the killer working with the FBI to solve crimes before they find out who he really is and the terrible crimes he's committed.
Hugh Dancy stars in the show as an FBI profiler who works with Lecter before he has to later turn around and catch him as we've seen in the movies that have come out.
The show already has one 13-episode order and unlike other series this show will start as a dramatic police procedural but will drastically shift course when Hannibal is found out and the FBI starts to go after him. As EW stated, the 13 episode season prevents the story from being rushed but also is short enough that no episode will feel like pointless filler.
“Doing a cable model on network television gives us the opportunity not to dally in our storytelling because we have a lot of real estate to cover,” Fuller says. “I pitched a seven-season arc including stories from various [Thomas Harris] books.”
Fuller's challenge with the character is to show a person that the audience is supposed to like even though they know he is a killer. Instead of trying to pretend that the audience doesn't know, Fuller is using the fact that they audience knows and have an "Alfred Hitchcock principle of suspense -- show the audience the bomb under the table and let them sweat when it's going to go boom.
For the main characters, the creator of the show says “It really is a love story, for lack of a better description, between these two characters.” He added, “as Hannibal has said [to Graham] in a couple of the movies, ‘You’re a lot more like me than you realize.’ We’ll get to the bottom of exactly what that means over the course of the first two seasons. But we’re taking our sweet precious time.”
In addition to the well known characters, Fuller is also using some characters from Harris' novels but doing some gender swaps, Dr. Alan Bloom has become Dr. Alana Bloom and Freddy Lounds, the tabloid journalist is now a tabloid blogger named Fredricka Lounds. Jack Crawford the FBI boss will also be making a part in the show, he will be the same as the book version though.
