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It’s been 30 years since the film version of Thomas Harris’ novel The Silence Of The Lambs blasted into theaters and made Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, and Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, into iconic movie characters. One of the best psychological thrillers ever made, it won a boatload of Oscars. Lecter’s character has since been explored in more depth on TV and film, but what of young Clarice? A new series tries to go into the junior agent’s inner life since killing serial killer Buffalo Bill.
CLARICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A fish tank. A manual digital clock flips to a new minute. A woman says, “I thought it was done.”
The Gist: It’s 1993, about a year since FBI agent Clarice Starling (Rebecca Breeds) killed serial killer and skinner Buffalo Bill (Simon Northwood). She still flashes back to that day, how harrowing the experience was, and she thinks of all the people he killed. In a mandated therapy session, she still refuses to acknowledge — or communicate with — the person she managed to save, Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), is still alive.
Her session, where the therapist (Shawn Doyle) Pthinks that she’s suffering PTSD “of the most egregious kind” and should be taken off active duty. Just then, though, some agents interrupt and order Clarice to Washington, under orders from new Attorney General Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson).
Martin, a former senator and mother of Catherine, is assigning Clarice to a new violent crimes task force, VICAP, because she has vowed not to have serial killers like Bill running rampant under her watch. Two women’s bodies were found floating in the Anacostia River and she is joining the team, commanded by Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), whom Clarise aced out in the pursuit of Bill (aided by Hannibal Lecter, of course… The therapist refers to him in a roundabout way, but the character can’t be referred to by name because another studio owns the rights).
Krendler doesn’t trust Clarice one bit, and basically tells her not to do anything he doesn’t tell her to do. She ignores that immediately, especially after she and Agent Thomas Esquivel (Lucca De Oliveira), whom Krendler orders to keep an eye on Clarice, examine one of the bodies. She doesn’t think that they’re victims of a serial killer; it’s more like someone who wants the killing to look like the work of a serial killer. Krendler doesn’t buy that premise and he wants her to tell the press, who know Clarice from the Buffalo Bill case, that she thinks it’s a serial killer.
But what Clarice and Esquivel find out during their investigation — largely done behind Krendler’s back — is that these women were targeted, and that they have special needs kids in common. They had gone to a newspaper reporter as whistleblowers. When they find the reporter has been attacked, they catch the killer, a hired professional, who wants a deal. Krendler wants Clarice to tell the press that they “got the guy” and not that this is part of a larger conspiracy. But that’s not part of Clarice Starling’s personality, is it?
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Silence Of The Lambs crossed with The Blacklist crossed with every CBS procedural.
Our Take: With Clarice, CBS feels like it’s trying to combine the procedural shows that their audiences love with a more cable/streaming-like conspiracy storyline that also contains some of the psychological exploration of the character made famous by Thomas Harris and Jodie Foster. It’s a lot to accomplish all at once, and we give showrunner Elizabeth Klativer (Grey’s Anatomy) and her writers (the series was created by Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet) credit for trying to stuff all three genres into one show and make them all make sense. But there are some glaring problems inherent in this method, all of which turn Clarice into a watered-down sequel to The Silence Of The Lambs.
It’s hard to follow Foster in a role, especially one where she had so much presence she won an Oscar for it. Breeds is game to take the role of Clarice on, but she doesn’t strike a particularly strong presence beyond an accent that is supposed to mimic what Foster used in the film but just sounds cornpone. If CBS is going to proceduralize her post-Buffalo Bill story, then the show needs to adhere to what makes those formulas a success, which is compelling central characters (the recent revival of The Equalizer is an example of this).
In this series, Clarice feels like a generic procedural iconoclast who has deduction skills beyond any of her colleagues, but that’s about it. Maybe as we get to know her in the context of the series as it goes along: Her friendship with her roommate Adrelia (Devyn A. Tyler) might open up some avenues, as will her reconnection with Catherine, who answers the phone when Clarice decides to call the AG for help. There’s going to be some childhood trauma that we’re going to explore.
But who knows if we’ll have time to go into it when we’re also watching her solve a new case every week, some of which may fit into the conspiracy that she’s chasing and some may not. Will she actually run into any serial killers or will all the mysteries-of-the-week feed into the larger conspiracy? We were a bit confused by the leaps she made to join together the various victims, and it seems like the conspiracy itself isn’t all that strong. So to feed that plot while she’s trying to sort out her post-Buffalo Bill trauma and her crappy childhood feels like too much, making Clarice a show that could have been a whole lot better than it turned out to be.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Against Krendler’s wishes, Clarice tells the press that these women were killed “trying to tell a story.” When the reporters ask her if she’s going to stay in DC permanently, she turns to Krendler, then turns back and says, “I’ll be here until we close the book.”
Sleeper Star: Notice we haven’t mentioned Kal Penn, perhaps the most well-known name in the entire cast (Cudlitz being a close second). He plays VICAP team member Emin Grigoryan, but he has so little to do in the first episode, there wasn’t reason to mention him above. We hope that Penn gets more to do in subsequent episodes.
Most Pilot-y Line: Krendler tells her to put a windbreaker on so she “looks the part.” As she dons her huge windbreaker, the agent who gives it to her says, “We don’t usually have one in your size.” Because she’s just a “little girl”, right? Sheeh.
Our Call: SKIP IT. If Clarice was truly an exploration of what is going through Clarice Starling’s mind post-Buffalo Bill, then we’d give it more of a chance, but it’s mostly a bad CBS procedural tied to a lame conspiracy plot, and that just makes the show a weak sequel to an great novel and Oscar-winning film.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
