In a way, I feel like - to echo what you've written - he takes death seriously throughout his work; which is to say, if we take the scene from Mockingbird Lane, which is arguably parodic and, as such, not serious, there were two ways to play it an subsequent scenes. One was the Addams Family way, in which death is talked about and inferred, but never something with actual bite or consequences. Whereas, even in Mockingbird Lane, not to mention Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal, death - real, irrevocable death - is always a possibility, which gives it a gravitas it simply doesn't have in many productions. And when people die in these shows - particularly Hannibal - we mourn, and that's what resonates most strongly with me. I cried more watching this show - scenes of Will and Abigail in Florence, Bella leaving Jack, and even the 'death' of the possibility of family and friendship - than any other I can remember, because the sting of death is palpable (and the same is true of the scene I linked to from Dead Like Me; it gets me every time, and that for all that the clip is isolated from the broader narrative). I've also been caught up for the past few years in thoughts of mortality, and as you say, there's a certain comfort in a show that takes those thoughts and the very real feelings they provoke seriously.

I agree completely with what you say about how Fuller deals in affect; where so much of 'quality TV' is predicated on either critical or ironic (arguably masculinist) distance, Fuller's worlds are first and foremost about emotional investment. Particularly in the case of Hannibal, it's the emotional violence that you remember, more than the grotesque set pieces or actual violence. The gore is a means to an end, rather than climactic, so that where, in a horror text such as, say, Halloween (forgive me; my familiarity with horror films doesn't go much past Nightmare on Elm Street...), the gory set pieces are what's climactic, each one upping the ante in order to build tension, in Hannibal they are more a means to an emotional end. At least for me, I find I care about who did what to whom, and why, more than I'm ever interested in the minutiae of the various crimes. The scenes I have such a difficult time rewatching aren't the ones that are gory, but the ones grounded in betrayal. It reads to me as unapologetic melodrama and, as others will be talking about this week, the entire production is so visually and emotionally lush - the very antithesis of the distanced production - that to love it, to my mind, is to allow for the possibility that there can be art in passion and quality in romance where we've grown so used to dismissing it as just so much (feminized) excess.

In all honesty, I haven't yet watched it. And I agree, he's very much working in a gothic frame. As Allison says, Frankenstein is one of its clearest antecedents, but so too are things like The Phantom of the Opera and all those stories where we are asked to sympathize with the beast/creature/monster even as our hopes for him are thwarted in the end. So many previous texts have taken us to the edge, asked us to long for the girl to understand and remain with the monster, only to succumb to propriety and the reestablishment of a normative moral order in the end. Fuller is playing in this sandbox, and his own take is singularly satisfying for the gothic-loving girl in me.

In truth, for me, Fuller-as-showrunner-auteur is something I kind of struggle with (in an early draft of this, I think I went so far to say that he defied typical auteurist understandings). On the one hand, these themes that recur throughout the works of his that I've seen do play into a clear sense of that underlying preoccupation so critical to auteurism. But at the same time, paratextual discussions of what the actors themselves bring to their roles (nowhere more important? or maybe just poignant than in the end, where the decision to embrace and fall seems to have been arrived at wholly independently of what's scripted - and all the talk of the other way that scene was imagined by Mikkelsen and Dancy), as well as Fuller's own penchant for surrounding himself with familiar faces (Caroline Dhavernas, Lee Pace, Ellen Muth, Ellen Greene, Raul Esparza, Eddie Izzard, etc., among the actors, and Guillermo Navarro, as well) and his participation in collaborative script writing suggests something more than just the brainchild of one man. And when considered against the backdrop of just how much Hannibal - of all his shows - seems to openly reject the high/low distinctions that tend to characterize contemporary stabs at auteurism, it doesn't quite seem to fit... Perhaps, if he's inverting Quality TV with Hannibal, so too might he be considered to be inverting auteurism - embodying certain of the characteristics of an auteur, but within a firmly collaborative context?