Making a TV series all about cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played so memorably by Anthony Hopkins in multiple movies, seemed like a terrible idea, yet creator Bryan Fuller turned the NBC series Hannibal into a cult favorite with its own distinct sensibility. So the prospect of a new series about the other main character from The Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent Clarice Starling, doesn’t sound quite so misguided in comparison. Still, what creators Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman come up with in the first three episodes of Clarice is not particularly promising, and it certainly lacks the sense of style and confidence that Fuller exhibited even in the earliest episodes of Hannibal.

Set in 1993, a year after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice finds Clarice (Rebecca Breeds) graduated from trainee to full-fledged FBI agent, but still traumatized by her experience with the serial killer known as Buffalo Bill. Perhaps because of complicated rights issues that prevent the creators from even mentioning Hannibal Lecter (just as the creators of Hannibal could never mention Clarice Starling), the show instead focuses Clarice’s angst on Buffalo Bill. The creators saddle Clarice with intense PTSD that seems out of character for the steely, no-nonsense agent played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs.

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The first episode of Clarice opens with Clarice talking to a therapist, and the first three episodes feature frequent traumatic flashbacks, both to Clarice’s confrontation with Buffalo Bill and to her difficult childhood in West Virginia. Lumet and Kurtzman double down on the Buffalo Bill connection by making Buffalo Bill’s final victim, Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), a main character. She’s even more traumatized than Clarice is, following her rescue from Buffalo Bill’s clutches. Catherine’s mother Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson), who was a senator in the movie, is now attorney general of the United States, and she too is fixated on Buffalo Bill, determined to stop any future serial killers before they can claim as many victims as Bill.

Michael Cudlitz and Rebecca Breeds in Clarice

To that end, she creates a new task force within the FBI called VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which in reality was started in 1985), and she recruits Clarice to be one of its first members. Clarice gets the job as much for her tabloid stardom and her personal connection to Ruth Martin as for her crime-solving skills, and the team’s leader, Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), resents her presence, hoping to send her back to a desk job as soon as possible.

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Keeping Clarice tied so closely to the Buffalo Bill case just prevents the show from moving the character forward. And every new idea that Lumet and Kurtzman come up with steers Clarice further toward generic police-procedural territory, so there’s not much to hold onto there, either. Clarice isn't just a bad sequel to The Silence of the Lambs; it's also a bad standalone crime drama, and combining the two aspects only makes each one’s faults stand out further. Once Clarice is placed on the VICAP team, she’s sent out on new cases, and the first episode introduces an apparent serial killer who turns out to be part of a larger conspiracy.

Kal Penn and Lucca de Oliveira in Clarice

Placing Clarice at the center of an investigation into a pharmaceutical-company cover-up is one of the least interesting possible uses for the character, but the creators seem determined to make that the show’s ongoing storyline. After an unrelated case of the week in the second episode, Clarice returns to the conspiracy storyline in the third episode, and Clarice eventually convinces her VICAP teammates to follow her on the investigation. Despite the efforts to tie everything to Clarice’s trauma, the generic corporate malfeasance has no relation to the character’s history, or to her supposed skills at criminal profiling.

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Breeds has very big shoes to fill in taking over the role from the Oscar-winning Jodie Foster (and, to a lesser degree, from Julianne Moore in Ridley Scott’s polarizing 2001 movie sequel Hannibal), and she isn’t up to the task, with her shaky Appalachian accent and her wide-eyed reactions to danger. The creators make an odd choice in using Krendler as Clarice’s tough but principled superior, since the character was so memorably played by Ray Liotta as a corrupt, self-serving idiot in 2001’s Hannibal, where he met an exceedingly grisly end. Cudlitz has plenty of experience playing cops, but he doesn’t give Krendler anything more than basic gruff competence.

The other members of the VICAP team (played by Kal Penn, Nick Sandow and Lucca De Oliveira) are even less distinctive, although they may get the chance to develop over the course of the season. The subplots featuring the Martins’ home life and Catherine’s disturbed mental state (shem for example, dotes on Buffalo Bill’s dog, Precious) feel like they come from an entirely different show, and the creators struggle to include Clarice’s best friend Ardelia (Devyn A. Tyler), another movie holdover character, in the central narrative.

Clarice also makes no use whatsoever of its period setting, aside from some passing references to the 1993 Waco siege in the second episode, which features a stand-off with a militia group. The way that The Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme illustrates all the microaggressions that Clarice has to deal with as a woman in the FBI is completely lost here, replaced by more blunt instances of sexism. The general lack of nuance makes Clarice a perfect fit among its fellow CBS crime procedurals, but also loses the uniqueness of the character and the world that author Thomas Harris created in his novels. Maybe it would be possible to create a Clarice Starling TV series that honors what’s great about the character while also forging a new path, but this bland, sanitized network drama definitely isn’t it.

Starring Rebecca Breeds, Michael Cudlitz, Kal Penn, Nick Sandow, Lucca De Oliveira, Devyn A. Tyler and Marnee Carpenter, Clarice premieres Feb. 11 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

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