Item: Serial Killer
Rating: 7
Author: Alex Maidy

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Plot: A year after rescuing Catherine Martin from the horror of Buffalo Bill’s basement, FBI Agent Clarice Starling gets an urgent assignment from Catherine’s mother, Attorney General Ruth Martin, to join the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) in the investigation of three serial killings

Review: The Silence of the Lambs is an important and iconic movie. While Anthony Hopkins Oscar-winning performance as Hannibal Lecter would go on to appear in a prequel and sequel film as well as serve as the focus of Bryan Fuller's excellent NBC series, we should not forget about Jodie Foster's Oscar-winning portrayal of Clarice Starling. When Foster refused to reprise her role in Ridley Scott's sequel film, Hannibal, due to disagreements concerning the direction the story takes Clarice, Julianne Moore took over the role in a film far different than The Silence of the Lambs. Now, thirty years after Jonathan Demme's Best Picture winner terrified audiences, Jodie Foster would be proud to see her character get a proper follow-up in the new CBS procedural drama Clarice.

CBS, as a network, has a long and successful track record when it comes to police procedurals. From NCIS and CSI to Criminal Minds and Magnum PI, it often feels like every show on the network is a slight variation on that tried and true formula. I was concerned that Clarice would follow that same path. What piqued my interest was the involvement from Alex Kurtzman who has worked on genre procedurals like Alias, Fringe, and Sleepy Hollow as well as the new Star Trek series on CBS All Access. Partnering with Jenny Lumet, who worked with late Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme on Rachel Getting Married, Kurtzman doesn't try to do anything flashy with the source material. Instead, Clarice tells a direct sequel to Lambs with both an overarching mystery and enough standalone cases to give this series some potential longevity.

Set in 1993 following the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice picks up with the titular FBI agent still traumatized by her investigation of Buffalo Bill and the rescue of Catherine Martin. At the urging of Catherine's mother, newly minted Attorney General Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson), Starling is assigned to VICAP under the leadership of Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz). Krendler, whose character was played duplicitously by Ray Liotta in Ridley Scott's Hannibal, is here a veteran from the Justice Department who does not get along with Clarice after a run-in they shared during The Silence of the Lambs. VICAP is populated by ex-sniper Tomas Esquivel (Lucca De Oliveira), Emin Grigoryan (Kal Penn), and Murray Clarke (Nick Sandow), all of whom look at Starling as the "flavor of the month" and not the talented profiler she is made out to be. Martin is on a crusade to prevent any future Buffalo Bill's from committing heinous crimes and wants Clarice to spearhead that mission.

Rebecca Breeds plays Clarice much closer to Jodie Foster's performance than to Julianne Moore's. Suffering from PTSD-like symptoms, Clarice must contend with what happened with Bill while still trying to prove herself as a capable agent. Relocating to Washington, DC, her first case involves a killer whose motivations may not be as serial as everyone wants them to be. Over the three episodes made available for this review, two connect to what seems to be a season-long narrative while the other is a standalone case. All three feature major implications for Clarice as a character and show that she is not yet an all-star veteran agent. Writers and series creators Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet make sure that while Clarice is sympathetic, her backstory both as a child and from The Silence of the Lambs events are integral to her development through this series.

What is immediately noticeable when you watch Clarice is the lack of any overt references to Hannibal Lecter. While this does seem like a creative decision, it is actually the result of the same rights issues between MGM and Dino De Laurentiis Company that prevented Clarice Starling from being a character on Bryan Fuller's Hannibal series. Aside from a reference to her former psychiatrist, Lecter does not factor into these episodes at all. As much as I would have enjoyed the crossover potential, this frees the series to focus on a wholly original story rather than retread material we have seen before in movies or Fuller's brilliant show. Coincidentally, Clarice does showcase some avant-garde slow motion and flashbacks that reminded me quite a bit of NBC's Hannibal but in much more fleeting doses. Where that show was operatic and grandly grotesque, Clarice is much grittier and closer in tone to The Silence of the Lambs

Clarice is much better than I was expecting it to be. Part of that is because it is a respectful follow-up to the original film and doesn't try to mine Hannibal Lecter as the centerpiece of the story. While I think Lecter is a brilliant character, The Silence of the Lambs really was Clarice Starling's story. By separating her from the cannibal, Clarice becomes a tale about the weight of celebrity on someone already carrying a lot of psychological baggage. I am not entirely sold on the standalone episodes just yet, but the serialized chapters have me very intrigued. The use of recreations and visuals from Demme's film help bring this series in line with what a sequel could have been like had the Oscar-winning cast and crew reunited on the big screen. As it is, Clarice is a chilling mystery series that more than lives up to its precursor.

Clarice premieres on February 11th on CBS.