My absolutely guiltless pleasure this past spring was Bryan Fuller’s NBC series Hannibal. Besides enjoying the quipping but heavy writing, fantastic performances, morbid crossing of death and food (Pushing Daisies much?), and themes of destructive imagination, this show is GORGEOUS. Design teams did an incredible job throughout, but I especially want to highlight the cinematography.

The image above is representational the show’s aesthetic in general: Tight Framing. Medium-close-ups. Deep, muted colors that tend heavily toward red and bluish-greens. Shadowy lighting. Shallow focus.

Let me repeat that last one: Shallow. Focus.

His neck is out of focus, but I can see every hair on his patch of scruff. Like, what? What?

And this is a constant throughout the show: Features of a face or object are sharp while features just inches away are not. Focus softens and sharpens in single shots. Backgrounds are entirely blurred. It’s beautiful, but also borders…