The premiere of CBS' Clarice tries to race ahead of your fond Hannibal Lecter memories
TV Reviews CBS
By the end of the first episode of Clarice, FBI agent Clarice Starling is once again standing in front of assembled media, explaining to them that the man they just caught isn’t a serial killer, and there’s something far more pedestrian (but arguably more nefarious) going on. She disobeys a direct order from her superior officer and tells the truth, because she thinks—and says, more than once—it’s important to speak up for the women who can no longer speak for themselves. It’s a noble sentiment, accompanied by impulsive and often ill-considered behavior that suggests she should be returned post-haste to the behavioral science lab basement from which she’s been summoned, wraith-like, to join this very public team of investigators. Starling seems potentially unstable, and is definitely suffering from PTSD. But that’s how you know you’re watching a CBS procedural: Logic must be shunted aside in favored of watching telegenic people hunt killers in ways that fly in the face of ethics, but are more exciting. Onward with the brutal slayings!
CBS’ newest show tries to split the difference between ongoing character study and a typical network procedural, and ends up falling pretty firmly on the side of the latter. Despite a first half hour that spends a lot of time reestablishing the character of Clarice Starling from The Silence Of The Lambs, the second half of this pilot lurches right into case-of-the-week territory. It may technically be unresolved—the man who killed the victims we see this episode is caught, but turns out to be working for someone else, suggesting this corporate whistleblower/drug trial coverup will be the overarching storyline for the season—but it’s still a tidy beginning-and-end narrative that checks all the boxes of a standard crime drama. “It was a quid pro quo,” Starling says early on to explain her arrangement with Lecter, and you can’t help but wonder if she’s secretly referring to the existence of Clarice on the CBS spring schedule, nestled amongst the other cozily unchallenging series in its lineup.
The pilot immediately sets up our backstory, via the time-honored method of having a therapist pepper someone with questions so that viewers can get an easily digestible “tell, don’t show” summation of their current state. It’s been one year since the events of The Silence Of The Lambs, and novice FBI agent Clarice Starling (The Originals’ Rebecca Breeds) has spent the ensuing time avoiding the press and attendant minor celebrity she accrued—instead hiding in a basement behavioral science lab, as her therapist acidly notes. She’s clearly still suffering from the psychological trauma of the Buffalo Bill case, though she denies it, and gets summoned to D.C. to become part of a new violent crime task force being put together by new Attorney General Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson)—the former Senator whose daughter Catherine was the one Clarice saved from Buffalo Bill. Faster than you can say, “Conflict of interest?”, Starling is investigating the murder of two women (and the disappearance of one more), and solving the crimes in the course of about 36 hours. Justice is swift on Clarice.
The pacing is, too. About the best thing you can say this premiere has going for it is that it barrels ahead so quickly, you’re not left with much time to mull over just how trite and predictable it is. From the moment Starling announces the killings look far too clinical and staged to be the work of a serial killer, it’s obvious she’s going to be proven right; unfortunately, the “how do they get from point A to the already-known point B” is the bread and butter of the show (or at least this episode), and it’s not terribly compelling stuff. The fact that Starling and her new partner in semi-trustworthiness, former military sniper Tomas Esquivel (Lucca De Oliveira), eventually get a break in the case by interviewing the missing woman’s autistic son is already hacky, even without the attendant praise it showers on Clarice for knowing the barest of facts about autism. (Seriously, having the dad break down in gratitude because she managed to suggest parenting could be hard for him was a bit like giving someone the Presidential Medal Of Freedom for reading a Medium post about volunteerism.) But the show does this a few times—have Starling intuit or understand something fairly straightforward, only for other characters to tell her (and by extension, us) what an amazing insight it is.
But that’s all anyone else is thus far: delivery devices for information about Starling. Even Clarice’s friend Ardelia (Devyn Tyler), who works cold cases and has the most lines of any supporting player, is barely a cipher at this point. Their interactions are little more than chances for the series to tell us more about who Clarice is, rather than showing us. Yes, pilots have a lot of heavy lifting to do, character-wise, and very little time in which to do it, but this still smacks of lazy shorthand. Things kick into gear in the last two acts, when the narrative picks up momentum and we race through the confrontation with the killer and subsequent decision on Clarice’s part to disobey her new boss, Krendler (Walking Dead’s Michael Cudlitz, looking very different without his muttonchops), in order to tell the truth about the man they caught. Will that decision cause friction with her new team? Ten bucks says “only intermittently, as plot dictates.”
The most intriguing part of this first episode was the conversation with Catherine Martin. Here, at last, is something different from a normal procedural, a direct narrative thread that justifies the intellectual property rights for Clarice Starling. Catherine isn’t just traumatized from her kidnapping; she’s unable to leave her house, and it’s immediately clear why Starling has been avoiding her calls—Catherine isn’t well. Sitting among broken mirrors, nursing Bill’s dog, Precious, she insists Clarice is just like her, and then hangs up. If Catherine becomes some sort of frenemy, or even a nemesis, for Clarice, it could make for some potentially rich material. Here’s hoping the series returns to her often.
By episode’s end, though, there’s not much to differentiate this from the average installment of, say, Criminal Minds. This entire hour felt like prologue to what the show will be, though, which isn’t the best start; hopefully now that the throat-clearing is over, Clarice can start doing something more interesting. But hey, at least it wasn’t boring.
Stray observations
- Interesting choice to hire Kal Penn and then give him, what, one line? Maybe two.
- The whole “Have you ever thought maybe he’s trying to make us THINK he’s a serial killer?” thing is awfully played out by now, so using it to try and make Clarice seem extra-smart doesn’t work that well.
- Ardelia keeps a notebook titled “PEOPLE I’M SENDING TO HELL.” Subtlety is not this show’s strong suit.
- “Can you sleep? Or do moths wake you up?” Clarice isn’t being very coy about the fact that it’s using Cathering as a bit of a Lecter stand-in.
- Speaking of which, they’re not legally allowed to say that name on this series, so they talk around it a couple of times instead. I’m sure that won’t get annoying.
- I doubt they’re going to keep up Krendler’s “shut up, you’re just here for PR” attitude for long, which is good, because that’s another pretty tired aspect of this setup.
- Let’s end on a positive note: Rebecca Breeds does a pretty damn good job of approximating Jodie Foster’s take on the character with making it a slavish impersonation.
81 Comments
“Can you sleep? Or do moths wake you up?” Clarice isn’t being very coy about the fact that it’s using Cathering as a bit of a Lecter stand-in.God, I hope not. I did like that she kept Bill’s dog.
I liked that Catherine and Clarice are both living in their respective Hannibal-caves. I sure hope she doesn’t go all ‘Alice’ on us though. It’s the first hour. It can only get better.
I thought it was a bit of a stretch that Clarice recognized Precious over the phone.
I only got to the first press conference . They took so much time with the ham handed exposition, and is there ever a police or FBI psychologist who isn’t an asshole? The first ten minutes is for the handful of people who never saw or read The Silence of The Lambs. The whole premise is ridiculous. Why would the AG get involved in a double murder? Why would the FBI get involved? There was no crossing state lines, at most they might be called in to consult. I would think the local police would be pissed off that the FBI came in and took over when no one knows who the suspect is, does the MO of the murders match something somewhere else? Waste of a good cast. I’d rather re watch Mindhunter.
Well, welcome to your daily network tv generic police procedural show. No matter how sweet they gonna cover it with beautiful movie like cinematography. In the end of the day, it still formulaic.
Linda, I think Serial Killing is the FBI’s jurisdiction now — if they can make a case for this being a serial killing, that is….
This is the definition of when they get involved. The FBI’s role in serial killer and other violent crime cases has grown from that of handling issues in its own jurisdictions to providing direct assistance when asked by state or local agencies as well as providing laboratory, database, training, and other indirect services. It was way too early in the investigation for the Attorney General of the US to command the FBI to get involved. I realize it was fictionalized to bring back Martin and her daughter. And the phone call between Clarice and Catherine was ridiculous. I understand Catherine reaching out to her as Clarice would be the only person who really knew what she went thru, but the dialogue was just bad writing. YMMV
I think it’s in the movie — in the book, some unnamed CSI took Precious.I like Catherine having him(?) better.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but my memory is that Starling wasn’t particularly gifted or special — she was smart and hard-working, but not uniquely so, and her big advantage was that she was willing and able to talk to Lecter and he liked her. So I don’t know what the character’s “hook” is, beyond the IP — I like the review noting that she’s showered with praise for pretty banal things.
There isn’t one. This is a bad idea for a show. Starling is an integral part of SotL, but the character was neither conceived nor designed to stand alone outside of that milieu, and this version only exists because of a weird rights accident.
That’s not saying that some visionary genius couldn’t have done something with it, but that kind of person historically doesn’t make CBS procedurals.
Yeah even Will Graham had his psychic/intuition thing, though that also got played out in the decades after the book was released. And Clarice was just a tough FBI lady
Clarice Starling is brave, dogged, smart, resourceful, and has Lecter’s (mostly unwanted) admiration — but she herself thinks she was just in the right place at the right time, and doesn’t have any “superpower” when it comes to serial killers.
That was…not nearly as bad as I expected? Some things actually went right:-Breeds isn’t wooden. The whole Clarice thing still makes me wish Jodie Foster was acting more, but the recast could’ve produced so much worse for a pilot.-Tomas isn’t bad. The funny:-They don’t have rights to Ardelia but they went ahead and used her anyway.The bad:-Krendler. Not in a hate-him way, but specifically that he’s so one-dimensionally a piece of shit. He’s like a giant executive note saying the boss needs to get in her way all the time. The most obvious place this could be going would be that Krendler is on the payroll of whatever pharmaceutical company screwed up the kids.-“A thing called autism” like the existence of autism is something that needs to be explained to people.
I know Hannibal (The Novel) was a shitshow, and I don’t know what this says about me, but Krendler’s ultimate fate gives me the warm fuzzies.
It takes place in 93, but people knew about autism then. Right?
In 1993 Autism was well known among mental health professionals, but it didn’t have anywhere near the public profile it does now. In 1993 I don’t think most people who didn’t have an autistic person in the family would have known the difference between autism and being “retarded”. The only pop culture point of reference would have been Rain Man.
The ailment that all 90s equivalent of wellness-influencer anti-vaxxer mums were keen to foist upon their sons for sympathy was ADHD – it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that autism become tres chic.(No, before anyone gets in a huff, I’m not denying its existence or making any claims against autism or ADHD, but merely pointing out where it stood in terms of cultural awareness, and why.)
Nah, people have known about autism since “St. Elsewhere.”
Yup, and that’s when we also found out that God has autism.
And that he’s a little blonde boy?
Exactly! Which might explain the actions of a few Catholic priests…?I’m so sorry.
Yeah — we didn’t always know the ways it manifested then, but we knew what it was.The first time I saw it discussed was the otherwise pretty dumbass Elvis Presley/Mary Tyler Moore movie A Change of Habit, where MTM played a nun working as a nurse at a free clinic in Watts, I think. Because of the neighborhood she wore just above the knee-length “minskirts” and 1″ heels most of the time (to the consternation of the priest overseeing their order!), so Elvis (as a doctor at the clinic) got lots of chances to check out her dancer’s legs and become very interested.They had an autistic child who couldn’t communicate normally, so the two of them had to let her have a fit while telling her they loved her to calm her down enough for Dr. The King to examine her. For a long time afterwards, I thought autism was Mute Plus Uncontrollable Tantrums….
Sorry, it’s just Change of Habit, and it was a 1969 release.
I saw it in Germany when I was a kid, and got to see Laura Petrie as the victim of an attempted rape…where the ostensible Latinx rapist mostly just seemed to want to cuddle with her!
I’m not making light of sexual assault, but I am saying the scene was so badly handled it played almost… romantically …? It was weird, and not at all in a good way — even barely-adolescent me could tell that much.
“-They don’t have rights to Ardelia but they went ahead and used her anyway.”They do, that was Ardelia.
Thank you, I got confused by the review calling her “Devyn,” but that’s just the actress’s name.
I’m curious about the ‘tone’, the ‘mood’ of this series and I’m sure I don’t have to be more specific (but I will be). The original film favored a sense of claustrophobia -small indoor spaces, and the soundtrack features silences broken by ‘natural’ sounds (breathing, footsteps, locks clicking, howls, echoes, etc). The visuals from the original – there were sepia tones and Demme favors some grainy images and close-ups that capture expressions conveying wordless surprise, shock, a sudden intuition. The original movie is brilliant in its rendering of fear concentrated like a special and powerful elixir. If this series has any of that I’ll subscribe.
I’m happy to report this was one aspect of the pilot I liked. Even for network TV, they clearly try to evoke some of Johnathan Demme’s sensibilities. To be honest, Clarice feels more connected to The Silence of The Lambs than Hannibal did, tonally and stylistically. That show had an awful lot of splashy, bloody slo-mo in that first season)
Being served this instead of Hannibal season 4 is rude.
The fact that they can’t legally mention Hannibal feels like a fitting revenge for how the MGM people never budged on even a character as pointless as Krendel being allowed to be used by Bryan Fuller.
Yeah, but we get punished for it, MrSmith1466!
Yes and no. Hannibal was cancelled regardless of them not getting Clarice Starling and for my money the season 3 ending was good enough as a conclusion. A crappy Clarice show not getting Hannibal is funny, because even without Silence material, the Hannibal show was still phenomal, but without Hannibal material, a Clarice show barely has a reason to exist.
I don’t know how, but I would have liked to have seen it go another two years just to see WTF more insane places Bryan Fuller would have taken the show.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever rooted for a show to get cancelled. What a waste of rights.
“Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.” Miss you Mads 🙁
::sniff!:: We all do — Him and Will both.They made the cutest couple of Murder Husbands….
I haven’t watched the show yet, though I should and see how bad it is comparing to what few reviews I read.Even so, I am still furious that we never gotten Season 4 of Hannibal. Didn’t helps that first half of Season 3 wasn’t really great, but I would love to see Fuller’s takes on Silence of the Lamb.What a wasted potential.
I read somewhere that Mads is up for another season if somebody like a streaming service can pull it together.
You read right, the cast are dedicated to do Season 4 if greenlighted.I don’t think we will because it might be that first 3 seasons on streaming service didn’t have good numbers as well and the issue of rights are still hanging in the air.
I got 5 episoede into Hannibal season 1 and it just seems mostly like a standard procedural that’s just gross. I hear it gets better with more developed story arcs. When? Can I just jump ahead a few episodes or should I start over with season 2 maybe? I love Mads and really want to enjoy that show.
The procedural stuff begins receding around that point. You’re almost up to Edie Izzard & serial killer vs. serial killer fight. You can’t really skip around because the characterization builds upon itself to a massive status quo shakeup in the season finale. Jumping straight to season 2 would spoil that.
Eddie Izzard? Sold!
It basically starts as almost a traditional police procedural show and then slowly descends into madness. With tracks with the arcs for the characters
*Which
Eddie Izzard? Sold!She is sooooo good in Hannibal. I actually found her more menacing and frightening than Hannibal himself, which is probably intentional, now that I think about it.
I just about said, “She?” I forgot. I did like when when she who was he at the time refered to themself as an “action transvestite”. That probably doesn’t fly these days but the words togetehr are funny.
Too bad Les Moonves is no longer at CBS — otherwise we could have him for dinner just to point this out.
It being a CBS procedural, I assume we’ll meet the quirky lab girl next week?OTOH, as hackneyed as that’s become, Edrisa on Prodigal Son is a delight.
Yeah Edrisa’s my favorite character on that show. Also man, Prodigal Son is weird. The cinematography, lighting, and music are very good, but the script is kind of…. off in my opinion? At one point, there’s a joke about why someone was still paying the phone bill for a landline phone that had been walled away and they say something about business managers but… did they just not know how landline phones work? If you pay the phone bill for your house, every landline phone hooked up in your house will be able to take and make calls. It’s not like a cell phone?
The only thing better than Edreesa is Edreesa on a caffeine binge.
I’m not American but her accent is… incorrect, right? I think they could have spared us the “previously on Silence of the Lambs” introduction at Quantico. I don’t understand its value here and this kind of writing always feels like the opposite of sharp, for me.But it’s Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman so I’ll wait a little.
I think the accent was meant to sound like Jodie Foster’s Clarice accent, rather than any particular region.I thought she pulled off Jodie Foster’s Clarice accent better than Jodie Foster.
I don’t think I’m going to watch this, as I see myself getting very frustrated with the fact that there’s nobody around who really appreciates Paul Krendler for his brains.
Would you prefer Krendler’s brains Sautéed 0r poached?Or perhaps…Tartare…?
Oh, definitely sautéed!
– From the Clarice Superbowl commercial, I thought that was Holly Hunter speaking.- The most interesting thing I read about the show was Catherine being in the main cast.- No Hannibal Lecter gets mentioned, but it’s weirder for me that there is no Jack Crawford in this universe. He wasn’t in Hannibal (2001), but that’s a bizarre movie anyway.
I was just thinking that when Clarice was talking to her boss, it reminded me of a Holly Hunter quote from Broadcast News that I read in a review here last week.Paul Moore : It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.Jane Craig : No. It’s awful.
Jack Crawford is on the Hannibal movie, but he’s basically an extra. I only know because Ridley Scott points him out on the DVD commentary and explains they had a larger role for the character, but scrapped it once Scott Glenn refused to play it.
“Faster than you can say, “Conflict of interest?””That’s…not what a conflict of interest is. Also her friend is the character Ardelia Mapp, from the film. She is played by a woman called Devyn Tyler.
I …. liked it? But I’m not tied to it needing to be rooted in the Hannibal of it all, so there’s that. Breeds is doing a pretty good Foster impression (and whomever questioned the accent down-comments … I thought it was spot on from the movie, and not a horrible WV accent (Though it sounds a lot like Wrenn Schmidt’s Alabama accent from For All Mankind, and I don’t know anything about an Alabama accent).
OK its got Michael Cudlitz. I’m interested.
It’s been one year since the events of The Silence Of The Lambs, and novice FBI agent Clarice Starling (The Originals’ Rebecca Breeds) has spent the ensuing time avoiding the press and attendant minor celebrity she accrued—instead hiding in a basement behavioral science lab, as her therapist acidly notes
Boy, that sounds like a skilled and sensitive mental health practitioner.
“Interesting choice to hire Kal Penn and then give him, what, one line? Maybe two.”Maybe it’ll be like Scott Thompson in ‘Hannibal’ and he’ll do more as the series goes on.
I kept waiting for him to be important. When the episode ended, I kinda laughed to myself. He’ll obviously do more later, but man would it be funny if he didn’t!
So Hannibal Lecter is essentially Voldemort; He who should not be named.
I lost interest when CBS is involved.
Hasn’t CBS been known as the old people channel forever?
Pet peeve. I may not have heard this correctly but when they are examining the bodies in the lake they refer to both psychopaths and sociopaths, bot ttems no longer used in clinical psychologists as sick perverted gross people that do terrible things to their victim’s bodies. I wouldn’t be surprised if those terms are still used by law enforcement and yeah, the genral laypeople use those terms in a stereotypical way about murder’s so maybe the writers knew better and just had to effectively communicate with the audience, but still not correct use of those terms.Ilso, this was the late 80s so the terms may have been still in use clinically so maybe I’m being pedantic and also wrong?
I think it’s set in 1993 (?) so I’m not sure where that puts those terms.
I was more peeved by Clarice’s shrink casually referring to Buffalo Bill as Buffalo Bill (media pizzazz) and not his given name.
I wass unimpressed and turned it off halfway through. I figured that I wiould see what people had to say here and then determine if I will watch the rest.I’m really unimpressed with CBS All Access. I just finished The Stand. Blah. Picard was a little disapointing as well.
Wow. Wow. That accent-twangy-thing. Also, Katherine was an American girl.
I only watched half of the episode so I may be talking out of my butt, but if I were to fake being a serial killer I might make those stabbings very deliberate and precise. It seems more like a serial killer to me, at least a serial killer in these kind of shows, that are sick and disturbed enough to be premeditated, slow and methodical. Look at Buffalo Bill. He had a process dammit. Random, passionate stabbing might be more of a crime of passion.
“Krendler’s “shut up, you’re just here for PR” attitude”…… has already exceeded its possible use in the plot. It’s obnoxious. You can have stupid people in a plot with them yelling to one and all, “See how stupid I am?”
I kind of dug how “Tomboy” by Bettie Serveert was playing in the car while Clarice and the other agent drove from the scene.
Things kick into gear in the last two acts, when the narrative picks up
momentum and we race through the confrontation with the killer and
subsequent decision on Clarice’s part to disobey her new boss, Krendler (Walking Dead’s Michael Cudlitz, looking very different without his muttonchops), in order to tell the truth about the man they caught.
Yeah, one thing about that. Okay, so the evidence is overwhelming that the killer is a hitman who was staging the kills to make them look like the work of a serial killer. They catch the man, and there is still the open matter of trying to catch the people who commissioned the killings. Fine.So Krendler is absolutely one-hundred percent correct that Starling should tell the media that the man they caught is a serial killer. Because if she instead does what she ends up doing and tells the truth, it warns the people who paid the killer-for-hire that law enforcement is on to them. And it gains the FBI nothing at that point to divulge that crucial information.Right? Or is there something that I’m missing?
The show doesn’t want you to think about that, but you’re absolutely right. The best thing Clarice can do is bring this up in the next episode. Might show they actually have their thinking caps on. Plus is would be interesting to see that Krendler isn’t completely incompetent and Starling- still new- can make mistakes.
Is it just me, or does Michael Cudlitz’s hairstyle game me a “if Biff Tannen became a Fed” vibe.
I was hoping this series would be at the very least watchable, but this pilot episode doesn’t seem promising.
“Clarice, is everything ok?”“Yes, I’m fine”“Is it the whole Rannibal Recter thing again? It’s been a year, Clarice. Ruffalo Rill is gone.”
I gave the pilot a shot but found it underwhelming. It has a Lifetime Movie vibe about it, and is littered with fan service even down to the fonts they used in TSotL. It feels like a hundred other cop shows and is riddled with cliches, such as the grouchy boss who blocks our protagonist’s path. The cast are pretty good and the acting is decent, but I found the overall experience hackneyed and mediocre.
a C+ is about right. But for me it’s a “decent” C+. Being a big fan of Jodie Foster in the film, I gotta say I think their new Clarice Starling is actually pretty good. I also like the style and tone feeling closer to what the movie was. (maybe trying a little too hard at times, but still.) Plus, the brisk pacing makes this an easy watch without commercials. However the writing is pretty bleh.
the show does this a few times—have Starling intuit or understand
something fairly straightforward, only for other characters to tell her
(and by extension, us) what an amazing insight it is.
This. This drove me nuts. But I have a bigger issue: There was another FBI vs serial killer show a few years back called The Following, with Kevin Bacon, and it too did the ‘killers killing for other killers’ thing. If this is going to be Clarice, I don’t know how much I’ll like it. But I think for now, with pilot pleasantries out of the way, they’ve at least earned a second date.
What does one have to do to get out of the greys?