CLARICE: Yet Another Police Procedural, Unfortunately

I delayed writing this review for a long time, because with all my heart I wanted to hate Clarice. At some point I was angry with CBS, because instead of making this trash, they should have given the world a fourth season of Hannibal with Elliot Page in the lead role.

However, when I started to approach the series objectively, I realized that it is just another decent procedural that feeds on viewers’ nostalgia and could just as well tell the story of an FBI agent with any name, not necessarily Clarice, who struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. Is this a thoroughly bad work? No, if we do not focus too much on the inconsistencies with the source material and detach ourselves from Clarice’s own story. So is it worth spending time on it? You will find out from the following review.

The action of the series takes place a year after the events of The Silence of the Lambs. Agent Starling struggles with post-traumatic stress and nightmares related to stopping the serial killer Buffalo Bill. The mother of his only surviving victim, former senator Ruth Martin, decides to form a team whose task is to prevent any serial killer from operating in the Washington area. It is headed by Paul Krendler, who is convinced that Clarice only had beginner’s luck.

If we compare the series with other products functioning in the Silence of the Lambs universe, unfortunately what we received from Alex Kurtzman is a complete mess that is very clumsy to watch. I really wanted it to work, even though I was not a big fan of the idea itself. But – as I said in the review of the first episode – Clarice Starling is an incredibly interesting character on so many levels that in the right hands her story should be explosive.

We know after watching The Silence of the Lambs that she dealt with the trauma of her childhood, and after reading the book Hannibal we know that she was clever enough to create her own memory palace, where she visited Hannibal. In fact! She was brave and intriguing enough to become his partner, which requires a certain degree of uniqueness. CBS’s production tries to show her character in such an uninteresting way that sometimes I felt that the TV fate of Doctor Chilton would have been more interesting.

Unfortunately, this is largely the fault of the script and the story being told. I think that chasing a single serial killer would have been much more exciting. But since this is a procedural, we have the so-called case of the week, which theoretically gives a lot of room to shine. However – let us not kid ourselves – in this case it does not work at all, and the viewer remains completely uninterested in what is happening on screen.

The problem is that the creators do not try to put the known characters in new situations and keep playing on nostalgia. People familiar with the films and books will be irritated that they keep seeing flashbacks explaining the situation from The Silence of the Lambs, while new viewers will be completely lost.

I like how Bryan Fuller dealt with the topic in Hannibal, where he took known characters and placed them in completely new contexts. Since we know little about the life and relationship between Hannibal and Will, he could create a story entangled in a postmodern plot twist, thanks to which both the characters and the plot are engaging. We watch more cases, we see how individual relationships and characters develop. For example, we know why Chilton hates Lecter, even though in the book it was treated superficially. The creators of Hannibal had so many possibilities that each of them seemed right.

This is missing in Clarice. The character does not evolve but has stopped in place, not pushing the character forward even a step, but dragging her backward, that is, into the past, which is presented much more interestingly in the film The Silence of the Lambs. I hoped that the creators of the series, like those of the film, would allow the title character to develop and evolve. We see how strong she emerges after the final confrontation with Buffalo Bill. We know that her demons, that is, the lambs, were finally silenced by the very fact of saving Catherine Martin.

Unfortunately, the series negates all of this and tries to convince us that Clarice is even more delicate than she was before, less autonomous, and dealing with enormous trauma. She is not a complex character, but defined solely through the prism of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is extremely unfair. I am convinced that she is a character with enormous potential who, both now and in the future, must constantly deal with a patriarchal world and male rules. And I am convinced that she deserves her own series on television – just not this one. The creators strip her of all intelligence and complexity in favor of a procedural where each subsequent villain is identical to the previous one.

The acting is decent. Honestly, the actors do not have much to work with due to the rather bland script. It is clear that Rebecca Breeds does what she can to match both Jodie Foster and the terrible performance of Julianne Moore, but it is not enough when there is nothing to play. I am not able to say whether she is a good or bad actress, because I have never seen her in anything before. After what she showed in Clarice, one can say that the complete misunderstanding of the character is certainly not her fault.

Agent Starling from the very beginning was super cool, though marked by trauma. Every man who tried to discredit her ended up with a sharp retort. Here we have a lot of sadness and little pride, and that already speaks poorly of the creators. If we got rid of the references to the original series and the aggressive stylization, we would get one of many contemporary procedurals.

What deserves a mention, however, is the issue of racism, which is shown through Ardelia Mapp (Devyn Tyler), a Black agent who is trying to fight for a promotion while her white academy friend, Clarice, is making a meteoric career. She is a brilliant, confident character whom you want to watch on screen, just like her struggles with racism in the FBI and the patriarchy.

Unfortunately, the series does not encourage you to return to it. The first season alone was quite a challenge for me. I gave the production a chance, and it did not use it. What we got is a product that focuses on everything except the title character. And yet elements such as Clarice’s childhood, her knowledge of psychology, and her struggle with a world dominated by men are a sure recipe for success. Instead of following this path, the creators focus on The Silence of the Lambs, forcibly trying to create an uninteresting continuation.

On top of that, they do not really know which way they want to go: nostalgia, victims, a story about survivors, reliving trauma. Unfortunately, the lack of consistency makes none of the introduced ideas work. And that is a pity. There was potential for an interesting story that was pushed into the background by a much safer solution. I hope that one of the networks (Netflix, I am looking at you) will decide to fix this mistake.