Lifetime developing Silence of the Lambs series Clarice

Good news, fans of cannibalism and sexually fraught psychotic thrillers! You won’t be left wanting for television shows catering to your highly specific and immensely creepy interests next season, because Lifetime has just announced they’re developing a series based on Silence of the Lambs’ fearless heroine Clarice Starling.

The aptly-titled Clarice will follow a young Agent Starling just after she graduates from the FBI Academy at Quantico. The series will presumably follow her adventures as she pursues an abnormally steady stream of perverted serial killers and deals with the daily hardships of being a single professional woman. There might also be a sassy assistant or something. 

Strangely, Clarice is actually the second show based on the Silence of the Lambs property currently in development. The Lifetime prequel joins NBC’s Hannibal prequel, which the network recently ordered for a thirteen-episode season to be written by Pushing Daises and Dead Like Me creator Bryan Fuller, who’s just the guy to lend the right amount of whimsy to a character who eats people’s faces and commits violent murders while listening to Glenn Gould. How everyone involved missed the perfect opportunity to combine the two into a show where Hannibal and Clarice drive around the country in a van solving crimes together is beyond me. Clearly, creativity is dead in the entertainment industry.

But, hey, people obviously can’t get enough of TV shows based on twenty-year-old thriller movies based on even older crime novels. Just look at The Firm! Oh, that got canceled? I see. Well then, these are both terrible ideas.

Please resume your regularly scheduled marathon viewings of Criminal Minds reruns.