Good news, Hannibal fans! There’s another TV show in the works based on Thomas Harris’ most famous cannibal, but this one will focus on Clarice Starling—the character Jodie Foster won an Oscar for playing in The Silence Of The Lambs. Unfortunately, there is also some bad news for Hannibal fans: This is completely unrelated to NBC’s horror show and it almost certainly won’t feature the same kind of lovingly crafted murder tableaus that Hannibal was known for.
This story comes from Deadline, which says CBS has made a deal to pick up Clarice, a Silence Of The Lambs sequel series written and executive produced by Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet. It doesn’t have a series order yet from the network, but CBS has ordered a pilot and put together a writers room, so it definitely has a lot of faith that the show will get picked up. As for plot specifics, the show will take place in 1993, right after the events of Silence Of The Lambs, with Clarice now “navigating the high-stakes political world of Washington, D.C.” while hunting “serial murders and sexual predators.” (That makes it sound like a very CBS-friendly procedural that happens to be about a famous fictional FBI agent, which is definitely not what Hannibal was, but that’s not this project’s fault.)
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Lifetime was developing its own Silence Of The Lambs-related TV show in 2012 that was also called Clarice. That one would’ve been a prequel about young Clarice right after she graduates from the FBI academy and before she ever met Hannibal. That project, which was in the works while a very small subset of the TV-viewing world was still swept up in Hannibal-fever, did not go forward.