Created by Jenny Lumet & Alex Kurtzman
Starring Rebecca Breeds, Michael Cudlitz
Thursdays at 10PM on CBS

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

“What do you do with all your rage?”

Those words, spoken by an FBI appointed therapist, gives me some hope for CBS’s Clarice. Created by Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet, and being showrun by Elizabeth Klaviter, the series is a sequel to Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film, The Silence of the Lambs. Which, itself, is based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Harris.

So, here’s something fun: the rights to Harris’s works are wildly split. This was also an issue for Bryan Fuller when he was making Hannibal for NBC, back in 2013. In that case, he could only use characters from the first Lecter book, Red Dragon. No Clarice Starling in sight. This time around, however, CBS got the other end of the rights deal. Nobody who appeared in Fuller’s Hannibal. Which, as you might imagine… happens to include Hannibal Lecter. 

So, what do you do with a show set in Lecter’s world that can’t show the good doctor, or even speak his name? You focus on the things you can: Clarice Starling, and what happened to her. Because at its core, Clarice is about a woman dealing (or decidedly not dealing) with a great trauma. 

It’s been one year since Clarice Starling (Rebecca Breeds) killed Jame Gumb (aka Buffalo Bill as played by Simon Northwood), and saved the daughter of Senator Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson) from the well inside his basement. In that year, she has been relegated to data entry in the Behavior Science Unit… and not much else. However, Ruth has been on a mission since the day her daughter, Catherine (Marnee Carpenter), was found. Newly appointed to Attorney General, she’s hellbent on starting up a new task force to stop others from going through what her family did. And Clarice is the only person she trusts to catch all the Buffalo Bills of the world. 

Despite the involvement of Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), who makes a brief appearance in the film but is a deeply obnoxious character in the novel, Clarice agrees to join the team. Rounding out her new colleagues is Tomas Esquivel (Lucca De Oliveira), Shaan Tripathi (Kal Penn), and Murray Clarke (Nick Sandow). There’s also the inclusion of Clarice’s old roommate from Quantico, Ardelia Mapp (Devyn A. Tyler). 

Two women’s bodies have been found in a river, by a large drain pipe, and Clarice is brought onto the team to help ascertain, and possibly catch, someone the bosses think might be a serial killer. It’s certainly the MO of a potential serial killer, after all. But with Tomas in her corner, she circumvents Krendler to uncover the truth by being good at her job and talking through the evidence, like she did on the Buffalo Bill case, with Ardelia. 

But luckily this show isn’t just about hunting down a killer of the week, which is certainly the least interesting part. No, it seems like the series aims to answer the question Clarice’s therapist posed to her at the beginning of the pilot. What does Clarice Starling, dripping in so much trauma that she refuses to think of Catherine Martin as alive, do with all the rage left over in her?

And the hook of having Catherine be a main character? Having this equally broken person act as a mirror to Clarice? That’s a very powerful piece of potential storytelling. That they are both victims, even if Clarice won’t admit it, and are outwardly handling it in different ways, is perhaps the strongest element. That, my friends, is the reason to make the show in the first place. Catherine is still her lamb, screaming, and Clarice might just learn that she’s one too. 

I only really have two big issues with the show, at least thus far. Firstly, the show does not give you a particularly close grasp on the original story of The Silence of the Lambs. It tells you what you need to know to emotionally connect with Clarice’s trauma, sans Lecter of course, but the rest of the story is resting at the edges, unknown. I think it has a lot to do with the rights issues, which I totally get, but if I hadn’t just read the novel and rewatched the film the nuances would have been lost on me. 

And secondly, there’s this notion in the main storyline that a victim’s son has autism because of the experimental trial she was in. Which… boy does that not feel good. It bears repeating from my retrospective on the 30th anniversary of The Silence of the Lambs that I hope this show does not repeat Demme’s mistakes, and instead replicates his humanity and sympathy in all things.

All that being said, I love this interpretation of Clarice and I’m very interested to see where the show takes her.