'Hannibal' TV Show Will Avoid the Topic of Rape

When "Game of Thrones" season five decided to pursue a rape storyline for one of its main characters, Sansa Stark, a lot of people became infuriated with the show. NBC's "Hannibal" has a source material that has rape content too, but show creator Bryan Fuller said that they will not be incorporating it from either a creative or an audience standpoint.

He revealed to EW in an interview that they will be avoiding the rape subject, and told fans not to worry about the gruesome act being a part of "Hannibal."

"It's one of the things on the show that we really wanted to avoid. They're ubiquitous on television, and there's an entire series (NBC's "Law & Order: SVU") that's about rape," he said. "It was challenging approaching the Red Dragon story because the crimes that Francis Dolarhyde commits in the novel include the horrible raping of corpses, and near-corpses."

Fuller said that it became a tricky matter of de-emphasizing women being targeted, and making more pronounced the crimes against the victim's family as a whole.

"We didn't want to glorify it-well, not 'glorify,' because I don't think any of the crime procedural shows are actually 'glorifying' rape. But it is certainly explored so frequently that it rarely feels genuine," he said.

"Hannibal" is not lacking for gruesome content though, with the first few seasons showcasing a lot of mutilation and other horrific crimes. But Fuller seems to be preparing for something else entirely, and he said that fans "will have to read between the lines" when they finally watch the next season.

He added that it will be "a horrible cherry on top of the sundae of crimes committed against a family."

Fuller also said that the issue of rape is not something that interests him as an audience member, but he defended "Game of Thrones" for the direction it pursued, saying that the rape angle was actually handled tastefully and worked to build up the story about its characters. However, not all of the shows on television are able to achieve that, he said.

"Hannibal" will be going back to the small screen on June 4 with a brand new season. It will bring back season regulars such as Hugh Dancy (Will Graham) and his psychiatrist-turned-enemy Mads Mikkelsen (Dr. Hannibal Lecter), Caroline Dhavernas (Alana Bloom), Hetienne Park (Beverly Katz), Laurence Fishburne (Jack Crawford), Scott Thompson (Jimmy Price), and Aaron Abrams (Brian Zeller).