Emily Renner

Really wanted to like this show. It is hard not to compare Rebecca Breed's Clarice to Jodi Foster's, but when I manage to do that, Rebecca Breed plays her very well. As a whole though, I found the show disappointing. It felt a lot more like a procedural crime show with weird Silence of the Lambs flashbacks and references forced in. Clarice's relationship with the Martins feels unnatural and it doesn't serve to benefit the plotline in any meaningful way other than to try and tie SOTL back into the show. I appreciate the deeper dive into the mind of Clarice, and the vulnerability Rebecca Breed injects into her portrayal, but there is something off-putting about the emotion and lack of sure-footedness I see in this Clarice. I also think it was a bad idea to splice in all the therapy scenes... Compared to the psychologically tense and intelligent conversations we witnessed between Clarice and Hannibal, the therapy scenes in the show seem very two-dimensional and lazily written. All in all, as a crime drama with a female protagonist on network TV, it is alright. As a continuation of the SOTL universe and a deep dive into to character of Clarice, it is disjointed and greatly lacking in dimension. After waiting so long for a spin on Clarice, and especially knowing that any rights to incorporate Clarice were withheld from the Hannibal series, this show was super disappointing. The TV show Hannibal had it's problems but I think it would have at least injected the gravitas and intelligence needed to carry Clarice through a series-based SOTL universe.