Hannibal

The series is a prequel to the story the 1991 film told, with the same character at its centre, and it is working against the screen performance that film established rather than only against Harris's novels. Demme's Lecter is caged, still, and terrifying in short bursts. Mads Mikkelsen's is at liberty, a practising psychiatrist and host, and the horror is that he is charming for whole episodes at a time. The show can make that choice only because the audience arrives already knowing what he is, and it knows because of the film.

The series adapts Red Dragon and material from the later novels, but spends its first two seasons in the years before them, on the working relationship between Graham and Lecter that the books summarise in a paragraph. Licensed from the novels without the rights to The Silence of the Lambs, which is why Clarice Starling is absent.