Hannibal hasn’t even completed its second season, but with good ratings and a strong critical response, NBC has shown the good taste (pun intended) to pick it up for a third. The show has produced enough twists and turns and a few WTF moments to keep any audience satisfied.

Hugh Dancy plays FBI profiler Will Graham, who is entrapped in the serial killer’s games. This is good drama and the byplay between Graham and Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) is worth the time and effort.

Hugh Dancy reflects on his character and the challenges of doing Hannibal.

The Flickcast: Can you talk about getting into the head space of Will because he’s a terribly troubled character?

HUGH DANCY: Yes. He’s not the happiest character I’ve ever played. Well, there’s obviously – other than Bryan’s [Fuller/Executive Producer] scripts, there’s Thomas Harris’s book, Red Dragon, that I went to before we started filming the first season, and that’s been the template ever since.

It was just, as a description of a character from the inside of his head, the most rich material that you can hope for as an actor.

Friday night used to be pretty much a wasteland when it came to TV shows. People go out on Friday nights so networks used to dump their least interesting shows, or ones they didn’t care much about, at the end of the work week.

Now, with pretty much everyone having a DVR and the networks needing to compete with cable and online, Friday’s TV fare has greatly improved. Case in point are two shows we’re big fans of: Grimm and Hannibal.

Both are new tonight, now that the Olympics are over, and we’ve got previews for both of them for you. We won’t get too much into details about what happens in the new episodes, but you can definitely expect some surprises and a lot of action.

Grimm airs at 9/8C followed by Hannibal at 10/9C on NBC. Check out the previews after the break.

Whatever happened to The Man of Tomorrow? In the late ’70s, when Richard Donner and Mario Puzo were making their Superman movie, they realized that the lead character, when in costume, lacked a personality. He’s tough, he’s fast, he can fly, and those abilities define him. It may be impressive as spectacle, but it’s a hard lead for an audience to connect with, and so they chose to focus on Clark Kent — in short and in a bad pun, theirs was a classic because it was more Man than Super. Now, with Man of Steel, Snyder, and his writers David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan, do precisely the opposite.

The film opens with the usual prologue, though seeming far more extended here, on Krypton. Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is arguing with the planet’s elders about mining the core of their world — he warns them that the planet has only weeks left before it implodes, and as soon as he’s dismissed, General Zod (Michael Shannon) appears and starts blowing the elder’s palace up. Jor-El escapes to his wife Lara (Ayelet Zurer), who has just given birth to their son, Kal-El, Knowing the planet is doomed, they place him in a shuttle and shoot him off to earth, but not before Jor implants a whatsit codex into the ship.

Zod attempts to intercept the shuttle, killing Jor-El in the process, but is overpowered, tried, and sentenced to the Phantom Zone, a kind of black-hole prison. Krypton implodes, and Kal makes his way to earth, specifically to the Kansas farm of Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane), who adopt the boy and impart to him the lessons of compassion and anonymity. I will say that it’s clever of Goyer and Nolan to handle Kal-El’s childhood in flashback, lest we sit through another hour or so of an origin story whose end we already know.

With the release of two completely freaking awesome trailers this week, the J.J. Abrams’ directed Star Trek: Into Darkness and the Zack Snyder directed/Christopher Nolan produced Man of Steel also release one viral advertisement each. Oddly enough, both viral videos have a similar production value to eachother.

First, the viral for Man of Steel launched, with heavily distorted imagery of General Zod warning Earth that “You Are Not Alone” and Zod demands Kal-El to surrender to him or watch Earth suffer the consequences. The video is insanely distorted, something like a scrambled message from an alien world might possibly look like if our primitive video software tried to encode it.

Most of the audio is pretty clear, stating Zod’s message loud and clear to the people of Earth. When I first saw it, I was ecstatic at what it looked like the Nolan/Snyder camp had put together for what could be a nice string of viral promotional ads.

Then, on Friday, the first viral for Star Trek: Into Darkness launched. Slightly more traditional, perhaps, with a viral video, with clips from the actual movie being shown in between distorted shots of lead villain John Harrison (played by Benedict Cumberbatch). This one plays out as more like you, the viewer, are seeing this message displayed on a screen, and Harrison is telling a tale of James Tiberius Kirk, and the misfortune that lies ahead for him and his crew.

This week on The Flickcast, Chris and Matt discuss a bunch of new topics and revisit a few old ones. Some of these include the Evil Dead beboot (or Army of Darkness, as Chris likes to call it), Game of Thrones, Mad Men, horror movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, Jon Hamm’s big problem and more.

They also made some picks his week, as usual, with Matt’s being the upcoming Marty Langford and Mark Sikes documentary on the making of Roger Corman’s mythic Fantastic Four movie and Chris’ being the new NBC show Hannibal.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook or via email.

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