All that being said, I think Clarice’s heart was mostly in the right place — that place being the extraordinary lead performance of Rebecca Breeds as the title character. Her Clarice Starling is a rare thing indeed, a cop character with deep psychological wounds who never once uses them as an excuse to cut moral corners. If anything, they drive her to become more stringent, more empathetic, and more compelling as a protagonist. Whatever problems I had with the show’s denouement don’t outweigh my disappointment that we’re unlikely to see more of it.

I reviewed the season, and unfortunately series, finale of Clarice for Vulture. I’m sorry to see it go.

There’s something about the sight of a gaggle of FBI agents standing around looking at a painting like students at an art critique that tickles the funny bone — for me, anyway. Crime-scene photos? Conspiracy walls? Evil Big Pharma execs giving press conferences before getting perp-walked? That’s the kind of stuff you’re used to seeing the Feds gawk at. Somebody’s commissioned modern-art masterpiece? It feels like someone’s pulling a prank. Which, in effect, somebody is.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Clarice for Vulture.

With two episodes to go, and thankfully no more weeks-long breaks between them, Clarice is closer than ever to its core mysteries’ denouements. I don’t know that we’ll get anything as transcendent as The Silence of the Lambs’ riveting closing act. But what we’re getting — especially with Rebecca Breeds’s fantastic performance at the center of it all—is reason enough to keep watching until the case is closed.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

“Everybody thinks it’s cool or funny,” Catherine Martin says of the serial-killer phenomenon. “These monsters, they leave human beings behind — like you and me.” She’s saying all this to the mother of the serial killer who nearly made her one of his victims, but she could just as well be saying it to the audience of Clarice. From the start, the show has steadily steered away from the sort of supervillain glamour that gets attached to serial murderers in the public consciousness. Buffalo Bill is just an asshole who dies coughing up his own blood on the basement floor in flashback after flashback; Hannibal Lecter isn’t even mentioned by name. That last bit is legally mandated, of course, but from this episode, you almost get the sense that Clarice might have kept him at a distance anyway. This is less a show about the evil that men do than it is about the trauma left in their wake.

I reviewed the tenth episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Which brings us back to The Silence of the Lambs, the still-controversial masterpiece from which Clarice springs, and the legacy of transphobia that emerged in its wake. People understandably focus on the scene in which the serial killer Buffalo Bill puts on his makeup and tucks in front of the mirror — but that’s not the real Bill, just a self-aggrandizing fantasy. No, the real Bill comes out when he’s taunting Catherine Martin by mocking her screams in the bottom of that well, pulling at his shirt to mimic having breasts in a cruel pantomime of womanhood, one meant to insult and injure. (I mean, in that tucking scene, he is wearing a dead woman’s scalp as a wig.) As both Hannibal Lecter and Clarice herself say in The Silence of the Lambs, Bill isn’t trans. He’s just a dime-a-dozen misogynist, killing women because he hates and resents them, not because he is one himself.

But within the world of Clarice, the discourse around Bill’s crimes is no more nuanced than the one around The Silence of the Lambs was when it came out 30 years ago. Transphobic shitheads are always going to use Bill as a cudgel; given that Clarice is built around Bill much more so than around even Hannibal the Cannibal, it behooves the show to address this head-on. Giving voice to these concerns, hiring a trans actress to play a trans woman in order to articulate them, making the point that the silences (pun almost certainly intended) around Bill and his place in popular culture are as damaging in their own way as an affirmative assertion of his illusory trans-ness would have been — these are worthwhile moves to have made.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

This week’s episode of Clarice finds the show at its most Hannibal-esque, and I mean that in both senses of the word. First, you have some of the show’s most boldly aestheticized shots: a roast duck filmed in disorienting, slow-moving close-ups designed to make it look like something out of The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, the appearance of Clarice Starling’s memories in a glass orb on her therapist’s end table, a slow-motion suicide off a bridge that ends with a scream and an artful blood splatter on the frozen river below. I don’t think Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet’s show is going to be mistaken for Bryan Fuller’s anytime soon, but it’s willing to borrow a few tricks from Hannibal’s bag now and then.One Great StoryThe one story you shouldn’t miss, selected by New York editors

In this episode, Clarice also proves willing to invoke the H-man himself — not by name, since that’s contractually verboten, but at least by reputation. “I am not worried about him,” Clarice tells her therapist when the woman mentions the famous serial killer who had previously taken an interest in the workings of Starling’s mind. When the therapist presses, Clarice insists, “He is not coming after me. For him, hunting me wouldn’t bring relief. It would only articulate his own unspoken self-loathing.” I’m still holding out hope that Clarice gets a season-ending phone call from her old friend — hey, this is Hollywood, miracles happen — but this’ll do for now.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

The most powerful tool in Clarice’s arsenal is right there in the title. At this midway point in the show’s debut season, Rebecca Breeds’s lead performance is holding up remarkably well. Never once when I’m watching her do I think, Oh, that’s a Jodie Foster impersonation; I think, Oh, that’s Clarice Starling, and move on. There was never any guarantee that this process would take place, but Breeds brings the right combination of fragility and steel to the role, and her accent is impeccable (especially when you consider her Australian background). With so much riding on this central role, the show would have collapsed almost instantaneously had Breeds not brought so much to the table. She makes it seem seamless, and that’s no small feat.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Decider.

This week’s episode of Clarice presents us with a meal and a mystery. From where I’m sitting, both are equally compelling. The first episode of the show that has felt like an organic extension of previous plotlines rather than the introduction or continuation of a procedural-style case of the week, “How Does It Feel to Be So Beautiful” seems to find Clarice finding its footing. I’m hoping it continues down this path indefinitely.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Thus concludes this stage of the investigation into the so-called River Murders. I assume there will be hell to pay for Clarice, who once again went off investigating on her own and fell into the clutches of a killer without having told any of her colleagues where she was going or what she was doing. “Alone is safe for her,” Ardelia tells the ViCAP boys — safe in a psychological sense perhaps, but physically it’s a pretty damn dangerous state for someone in Clarice’s line of work, and two women are dead because of Clarice’s actions. It’s a conundrum: Her investigative instincts are brilliant, but her risky propensity for going solo threatens to undo much of the good she’s otherwise capable of doing. I’m glad the show crafted this compelling little horror story to emphasize this central conflict. Here’s hoping they keep on turning the screws until something snaps.

“Lurid” may be the best zone for Clarice judging from last night’s episode, which I reviewed for Vulture.

Still, as Clarice is waylaid by yet another killer whom only she seems able to detect and stop, it’s hard to ignore the show’s liabilities as a narrative. The Silence of the Lambs works because Clarice investigates only one case and has only one brush with death. In Clarice, she’s already had three near-death experiences in four episodes total. This is standard cop-show shit, for sure, but don’t you want your Silence spinoff to be more than standard cop-show shit? If, multiple times a season, Starling’s going to come within a hair’s breadth of being killed before the killer gets thwarted, its painstaking realism will become a liability right quick. Hannibal could get away with Will Graham & Co. bagging killer after killer because it was pointedly disinterested in realism from the start. Clarice has no such ambition and no such luxury.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

And it’s a decent episode, all told, and for all its faults. I’m not sure if the conspiracy story line has legs, or if it’s the kind of story fans of The Silence of the Lambs Cinematic Universe are interested in seeing; if this show doesn’t serve up a new serial killer with a cool nickname and a horrifying M.O. by the end of the season, I’ll eat a census taker’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. I’m also not wild about recasting Martin and Krendler as Clarice’s surrogate work-mother and work-father.

But that close-up device from Clarice’s therapy sessions, and her surreal visions of those moths, point to a potentially more visually imaginative show than what we’ve seen so far. Clarice’s ability to bulldoze institutional obstacles with her powers of observation is another positive trait for the show. I think that’s the real tension underlying Clarice: Can a show on CBS, a network replete with Good Police catching the bad guys, ever be as interesting as the hugely and deservedly acclaimed film on which it’s based? That a “yes” is even possible at this point has to be counted as a victory. And like Clarice and the VICAP team, you take your W’s when you can.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Last week, Clarice Starling uncovered a series of murders targeting whistleblowers. For now, at least, that case is off the docket. Instead, she and the rest of the FBI’s VICAP team are off to Tennessee, where local and federal law enforcement are in a tense standoff at a heavily armed militia compound. The confrontation, which began when an unknown member of the group opened fire on an ATF agent, threatens to become “another Waco”—something Attorney General Martin, a Tennessee native, wants to avoid at all costs. There’s dingy local color, there’s flashbacks to Clarice’s Appalachian childhood, and there’s a bunch of generic cop-show stuff that raises some uncomfortable questions about what, exactly, we’re doing here.

For starters, why is Clarice tagging along on this mission, considering the insubordinate way she went off-script and described the whistleblower killings as coordinated and targeted rather than the work of a serial killer last week? Her boss, Agent Krendler, has in fact already requested her transfer off the VICAP team as a result. “The only reason you’re here,” he says to her, “is I don’t trust you out of my sight.” That creaking sound you hear? That’s the writers strrrrrrrrrrretching to keep Clarice at the center of the action despite behavior that ought to sideline her. Not a good sign, this early in the series!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

I joined Ricky Camilleri and Chris Chafin on the Thirty Years Later podcast to talk about all things The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about the cornerstone of the Hannibal Lecter Cinematic Universe that I think you’ll really enjoy!

There is one very live issue on which the pilot appears to have closed the book already: How much of a presence will Hannibal Lecter’s absence occupy in the show? Clarice’s legally mandated inability to mention him by name — in one of the episode’s funnier moments, Clarice’s shrink refers to him as her former therapist — did not necessarily mean he wouldn’t still be there, exerting unseen influence.

Consider, for example, the way Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone became a sort of structuring absence in The Godfather Part II, a void around which the whole story implicitly orbited, with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone attempting to live up to the old man’s legacy while the flashbacks to Robert De Niro’s young version of Vito depicted how he became the larger-than-life presence he was in the first film. A bit closer to home, Laura Palmer was just a prom photo and a few seconds of videotape footage for the bulk of Twin Peaks. However, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never lost sight of how her absence, caused by her murder, continued to affect her family and friends, even after the circumstances of that murder were uncovered and solved. (Well, more or less — particularly by the show’s third season, it was clear that nothing in Twin Peaks was ever truly solved).

By contrast, Clarice devises a bold and, to my mind, successful work-around for the Hannibal issue: It prioritizes Clarice’s experience confronting and killing Buffalo Bill, the murderer whom Lecter helped her track down, rather than her experience with the good doctor himself. The decision actually makes good sense, from a character perspective. Sure, Clarice’s conversations with the Cannibal were harrowing; granting a psychopathic psychiatrist a deep dive into your childhood trauma is gonna leave a mark. But Clarice implicitly argues — with ample justification, as far as I’m concerned — that killing a man before he kills both you and the young woman he intended to be his seventh victim is a much bigger deal, leaving much deeper wounds. Clarice’s constant flashbacks (emphasis on flash; they pop up for split seconds) to Bill and his moth-infested house of horrors ground the show in that experience, not in Clarice’s comparatively tame quid-pro-quo relationship with Lecter.

(That Lecter is currently at large in the show’s time frame, having escaped during the course of the events of the film, does not appear to enter into its calculations at all; as Clarice herself said in the movie, she’s not worried about Lecter coming after her, because “he would consider that rude.” Case closed!)

I’m covering Clarice for Vulture, starting with my review of the series premiere.

2. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme

CAST: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

RATING: R

From the perspective of the Oscars, this is the most acclaimed horror movie ever made. From the perspective of a horror fan, the statuettes are well deserved. Anthony Hopkins is a monster par excellence as Hannibal Lecter, the refined cannibal killer whom Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee Clarice Starling consults for help in catching another serial murderer, the virulently misogynist and transphobic “Buffalo Bill.” The Silence of the Lambs is sad, in the way any film that’s seriously grappling with the reality of serial killers must be; it’s white-knuckle thrilling, like any good cat-and-mouse thriller; and it’s a parable of living as a woman in a world dominated by the male gaze. In other words, it’s as good as you’ve heard.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to horror on Netflix this month for Decider.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 

Demme’s ticket to horror-movie immortality, and a well-deserved one at that. This iconic thriller about an FBI agent (Jodie Foster, never better) using a serial killer to catch a serial killer made a superstar out of Anthony Hopkins; compare the actor’s work here to his subsequent turns as the charismatic, cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter and you can see the director’s sense of less-is-more restraint paying dividends. The film also broke a bloody glass ceiling at the Oscars, too, becoming the only horror movie to date to win Best Picture. But it’s the thoughtful way in which Demme shot the world that our heroine Clarice Starling has to navigate – so many male faces, looming huge in the frame and staring right into her (and our) eyes – that remains Silence’s most pointed commentary on predators and patriarchy. STC

I forgot to link to this when it went up, but Rolling Stone put together a lovely tribute to the work of the late director Jonathan Demme, and I was honored to contribute a few words on The Silence of the Lambs, a great film.