By Travis Marmon

While I have never understood the popularity of food and cooking shows, my attention will be drawn to televised meal preparation tonight. Why? Because season two of Hannibal premieres at 10 p.m. on NBC, and everything Dr. Lecter cooks up looks delicious — as long as you ignore the fact that it’s made from people.

For the unaware, Hannibal is a television adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon novel series (famously brought to the big screen in The Silence of the Lambs). The show is the brainchild of Bryan Fuller, the man behind the morbidly obsessed series Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me. It focuses primarily on Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), an FBI investigator whose extreme empathy helps him solve homicide cases; and the titular Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), a brilliant psychiatrist who assists the FBI in these cases while hiding the fact that he is a cannibalistic serial killer. The two have both a professional and a doctor-patient relationship, but season one ended with Hannibal framing Will for a string of murders that Hannibal had committed under the FBI’s nose.

The show is as gruesome as television gets. The first season included a pharmacist who grew fungi on comatose diabetics, a human cello and a totem pole of corpses, among many other grotesque displays (which somehow only earned a TV-14 rating for most episodes). But lest you think it’s another stupid serial killer show like The Following or the last few seasons of Dexter, you must realize that Hannibal is not attempting the same gritty realness as those shows. Its visual imagery is supposed to be the stuff of nightmares, not a harsh reminder of our grim reality. The atmosphere is one of constant unease and wrongness, like in the work of David Lynch or the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining. The music and lighting isn’t meant to scare, but to disturb.

While the popular consciousness thinks of Hannibal Lecter as Anthony Hopkins portrays him in The Silence of the Lambs — all one-liners and malevolent grins — Mikkelsen brings an eerie calm to the role. His thick Danish accent and stoic facial expressions make Lecter appear almost alien to this world of stressed-out FBI agents. There’s also the fact that, while Hopkins’s Lecter was a convicted serial killer helping the Feds from prison, this version of Hannibal is a practicing psychiatrist who has murdered countless people in secret and often feeds his victims to his houseguests. He keeps a Rolodex full of people who have annoyed him over the years and a book of gourmet recipes, into which he likes to include their remains. And the food always looks good.

Although NBC has moved Hannibal from Thursdays to Fridays (perhaps because Parks and Recreation was not the most fitting lead-in), it’s worth suspending your weekend partygoing for an hour. If not, you can always catch up on Hulu. But if, like me, you enjoy nightmarish stories and talented actors, you’ll be gluing yourself to a television as part of your Friday pregame. Just don’t think about it too much when you’re eating at Mom’s later.