There’s nothing on TV quite like NBC’s psychological horror drama, Hannibal. The dark creation of gay showrunner Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, StarTrek Voyager, Wonderfalls) the show is based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon in Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series. If you still shudder when you recall Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal is the show for you. The series has the high style of that other gay showrunner, Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, combined with the truly gripping drama of a thriller like The Blacklist. Visually exquisite, shockingly horrific and arguably the most homoerotic show on TV, Hannibal opens the door to the darkest of all taboos and perversions–cannibalism–and you cannot look away from the visual feast. Fridays on NBC.

5. Foodies
Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) is a psychiatrist and consultant to the FBI on serial killers. He’s also a foodie from way back, preparing the most elegant meals for his friends. But where does he get his meat? It’s not like anything else his guests–among them Agent-in-Charge Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), Dr. Abel Gideon (Eddie Izzard) and his protégé Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl)–have tasted before...

4. Hors d’oeuvres
The murders are grotesquely beautiful–the bodies of the victims arranged liked elaborate art, paeans to the victims. One young woman is displayed like a a soaring bird; another has her back arched over the antlers of a buck; a man’s body has been hollowed out to become the repository for a beehive; another is made into a human cello. But where are their organs? Tabloid crime reporter Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki) is determined to get the real story.
 

3. Amuse Bouche
Special Agent Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park) is the hot Asian medical examiner and forensic specialist working with the very strange Dr. Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) to uncover the evidence of who is committing the serial murders. Fearless, sarcastic and oh-so-smart, Agent Katz is loyal to only one thing: the truth.  
 

2. Appetizers
Dr. Bedelia du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) and Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas)--both beautiful, both vulnerable--are psychiatrists to Hannibal’s main men: du Maurier tries to get into Hannibal’s head while Bloom is inveigled by Graham. Both women are enticed by these disturbed men who keep them at arm’s length, but will either be able to decipher or deal with the truth about Hannibal and Will?

1. The Main Course
Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) is one of the most intriguing characters ever on the small screen. He is as passionate as he is distant and Mikkelsen’s performance is nothing short of brilliant. Hannibal’s great loves are cooking, which he does with tender, elaborate and obsessive care and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), to whom he is drawn both as a moth to a flame and as a cat to a mouse. Hannibal is mad for Will–literally. And in Hannibal, Will has finally met his intellectual equal. Their homoerotic dance is both incredibly sexy and deeply unsettling. Where will this game they are playing ultimately take them–the bedroom or the morgue?
　
　
Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a contributing editor for Curve magazine, Curve digital and Lambda Literary Review. She is the author and editor of nearly 30 books including the award-winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability. Her collection, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for Cultural/Historical Fiction. Her Y/A novel, Cutting will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX