They could probably get away with a Clarice Starling copy that mirrors her relationship with Hannibal so long as they use different material for the surrounding plotlines.

If you wanna see some grade A Scott Buck bashing, head over to the AMA he did for Dexter season 8. It was just hundreds (thousands?) of posts of people calling him an idiot and insulting his tenure as Showrunner of Dexter.

I wasn't aware of this, but it makes some more sense now. Still, the show is clearly in development hell, and I doubt Lifetime will generate any appreciable income from such a show. Furthermore, the audience of Hannibal and the audience of Lifetime have very little overlap, I'd imagine.

Fair point, but realism isn't exactly at the forefront of this show. This show is almost a kind of horror fantasy; serial killers lurk behind every corner, execute their victims in outlandishly artful and bombastic ways, and where the human psyche mirrors Dante's hell itself.

I don't even understand this problem. What does MGM possibly stand to gain by camping out on the Silence of the Lambs rights? All I can possibly imagine is that they plan on capitalizing on it in the future with a shitty "Halloween 2007"-style remake, which they can still do even if the show uses the material too.

The ending of the show will be original material. This season (and partially the last) are where "Hannibal" will be drawn in.

It's a critical darling with emmy and hit potential. Someone would pick it up.

I think the acclaim for the finale comes from a variety of dimensions. I don't think the tension of the episode was supposed to come from the idea that Hannibal "might" be captured. It's made plainly evident in the first scene of the season that this is not the case.

If it makes you feel better, the serial killer of the week format was forced upon them. As time went on, the rules in this regard were loosened (due to strong critical success I bet), hence them being greatly diminished in season 2. In season 3 as I understand it, they are gone entirely.

Seasons 5 and 7 were the only post 4 seasons that even meet the middling criteria of "good". Seasons 6 and 8 are an all out assault on intelligence and rank among the last two seasons of the X-Files the worst seasons of television I've ever seen.

And it is. There's art for everyone. You don't like Mad Men's ending, but there are lots of endings you do like. Great! Everyone's happy!

This is a more fair point than the flood of "Weiner/Chase are lazy/afraid of fans being upset!"

"But he didn't want to have the ownership of that choice. "

"Yes I do get to define it, for myself."

You don't get to define what makes great narrative art, or what narrative art "should be". You are free to not like how something was handled, but to say that every narrative that chooses not to wrap everything up in a little bow is "cowardly", then you'll be damning some of the greatest pieces of fiction ever made.

It isn't laziness that prompts these kinds of endings. Do you really think Weiner/Chase were sitting at their desks, looking at their scripts and thinking to themselves "boy, I really don't want to write another 12 pages. How about we just cut to black/coke ad and let those dumb fans figure it out. Yeah, he he he,…