Hannibal at TCA: Panel promises even more operatic crimes and even more kissing

The cast of Hannibal flew in to Pasadena Sunday morning and brought along showrunner Bryan Fuller to promote the second season of the show, which begins February 28 on NBC. (Yes, that’s a Friday, a tacit acknowledgement from NBC that the show will be low-rated but could hang on for several years if it clears a certain threshold on that night—or on that night plus DVR numbers from later.) Somewhat cheekily, the session was scheduled for over breakfast, ostensibly because it was the only time all four main cast members (Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Caroline Dhavernas, and Laurence Fishburne) could be available for a panel at the same time, but no one involved—reporters and panelists alike—was above the obvious jokes about eating a meal while discussing a show about a cannibal. “The sausage is people!” cried Fuller, setting the tone for the day.
Those of us in the room had seen the first two episodes (which tell one story), so discussion necessarily involved plot points from those hours. I’ll try to keep this spoiler light, but if you don’t want to know anything about the upcoming season, the combination of this article and the trailer NBC sent out could spoil some pretty major things. So either don’t read beyond this point or don’t watch that (or both). For the rest of you, please, we’ve all seen Silence Of The Lambs. We know where this is headed.
Much of the talk revolved around the sequence that opens the season premiere, which I’ll try to talk around a bit (though, again, if you watch the trailer, you’ll know what it is instantly). The sequence, which is between Fishburne and Mikkelsen, took around 20 hours to shoot. Fishburne opined that in a film, it might have taken two weeks, but on television, there’s no such luxury. Still, it looks terrific, and Fuller’s instinct to lead off the season with it—to give some sense of “instant gratification”—looks like a smart choice, given the sense of pace and inevitability it gives to the whole season.
Other teases for the season to come involved the “cases of the week” taking up more time in given episodes, with the stretch of episodes between four and seven in particular telling one big story this season. (In that story, things are going to get very bad for a bunch of characters, and Dancy earlier said of the misery Will will endure this season that “This season it’s even worse, so I’ve been very happy.”) Also in terms of structure, the season is broken roughly into two chapters, the first taking up the first seven episodes and the second taking up the last six. Fuller also situated the premiere as sort of “episode 14” of season one, finishing out some of the story beats from that season. The first killer of the week—whose story plays across the first two episodes—is meant to deliberately evoke what Hannibal is doing to the other characters on the show. Finally, this season’s guest stars will include Amanda Plummer (as someone who will make viewers think twice about getting acupuncture, apparently), Jeremy Davies, and Jonathan Tucker, as well as returning players like Gillian Anderson and Raul Esparza.