The first time I heard that they were making a TV show called ‘Hannibal’ I was annoyed. They had already taken a brilliant and purposely underused role and removed all his mystique through sub-par sequels and a money grab of a prequel – ‘Hannibal Rising.’ I constantly had wished that they just had left Hannibal as a background character and left his biography a mystery because, despite a writers strong desire sometimes, it is best that they don’t explain everything all the freaking time.

At the time of the announcement the single worst thing about this project was that the network behind putting it on the air was, quite frankly, the single worst creative force on TV right now. Yes NBC is worse than MTV with ‘Buckwild’ and that damned Boston singles show (that’s on MTV right?). MTV wasn’t going around pretending to be anything more than it was, and pretending to be anything other than a third rate disaster of a creative force is exactly what NBC does everyday. Besides, any network that puts ‘Whitney’ on the air should be taken to the Hague and hopefully found guilty for crimes against humanity. Hang that damned peacock!

Then I heard that the showrunner was going to be Bryan Fuller. The same Bryan Fuller responsible for ‘Dead Like Me’ and ‘Pushing Daisies’ – both of which I loved – and all of a sudden my interest what piqued. Following that, casting news came through and I was back to not really caring anymore. It had looked like Laurence Fishburne was moving from one procedural to another and who is this Who Fancy aside from the guy married to Cry-Face? I think Cry-Face is a Dick Tracy character? I think? I will Google that later. But then the announcement of who was going to be THE GUY came down and it was Le Chriffre himself – Mads Mikkelsen – BAM interest came rushing back. All of a sudden I knew that in the very least Mads will be running around chewing up the scenery as the human devouring doctor. A fantastic choice for Hannibal was all I needed to at least check out the pilot, but I’d need more to keep watching after that.

Despite an incredible media blitz to let us all know when the premiere would be, I was surprised when it was upon me. Honestly I was one misplaced potty break away from not realizing I needed to change the channel to NBC, but luckily I didn’t miss any of the first half of the episode, because then I would have missed the surprise of the show – Hugh Dancy. Will Graham can easily be another version of many characters we have seen before, a cookie cutter investigator that has an incredible ability to observe and interpret crime scenes. And sure that is something that we get with Will, but the interpretation and characterization of Graham is fantastic. The fact that he is one bad night away from basically being a serial killer, his asbergers (which is getting close to being incredibly overused as a character trait), and quite frankly the performance of Hugh were all refreshing and exciting. After the reveal of Mads as Hannibal, Hugh continued to be the brilliant attention stealing surprising powerhouse of the episode so much so that if he continues this up an Emmy wouldn’t be out of line – yes over Bryan Cranston or Jon Hamm.

Beyond performances the other most surprising thing is the gore, they don’t shy away from it at all. The sheer amount of blood at times would make QT proud if he were a part of the show. Without the support of the network and the willingness of the production team to have the violence they wouldn’t be able to really tell these type of stories about serial killers and cannibals. Honestly who would have thought that NBC would have the balls to show these images on their network? Images, quite frankly, at times were legitimately unnerving to my jaded soul.

I still assume that NBC will find a way to destroy it by either tweaking it over and over again till it is a shell of this brilliant pilot or just canceling it well ahead of its time like they did with Awake. So keeping that in mind you really need to grab at this show while you can, cause just like a teenage boy in the fifties finding a Playboy in his dad’s sock drawer, who knows how long we have to gaze upon this.

PS Gillian Anderson and Eddie Izzard are both scheduled to have several episode guest roles this season, so THAT should sweeten the pot a little bit more for you to watch this show.

(Airs Thursdays on NBC at 10pm)