With "Love Crime," Brian Reitzell and Siouxsie Sioux somehow surpassed Manhunter's use of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" for Graham's fight with Dollarhyde when Hannibal musically tackled that same moment

Former Hannibal composer Brian Reitzell and the recently unretired Siouxsie Sioux (Photo source: EW.com)

Brian Reitzell's eerie score music from Bryan Fuller's now-defunct Hannibal is completely bonkers. It's largely non-melodic and is more like sound FX rather than traditional-sounding score music. Think the horror equivalent of Gil Melle's similarly creepy and non-melodic synth score from The Andromeda Strain, but performed with bronze percussion instruments or old-fashioned oddities like a Newton's cradle--which, as the Hannibal composer and music supervisor pointed out to interviewer Hrishikesh Hirway on 99% Invisible, was chosen to represent the synapses firing inside the brain of FBI profiler and "empathy disorder" sufferer Will Graham (Hugh Dancy)--and a bullroarer (a piece of wood on a string, spun around to produce a roaring noise and used in Aboriginal religious ceremonies).

During Reitzell's Hannibal score albums (the kind of score albums that are made to be listened to only on headphones in order to catch all the various intricacies of Reitzell's nifty soundscapes), you're more able to notice how bonkers the sound design in Reitzell's score music is because your attention isn't drawn to either the gruesome prosthetic makeup on Raúl Esparza as the disfigured Frederick Chilton or the shots of misshapen corpses in grisly crime scenes that look like art installations created by the world's most fucked-up sculptors. A couple of lengthy excerpts from the score albums for Hannibal's first two seasons (the nearly 12-minute "Trou Normand" and the eight-minute "Tome-wan") are currently in rotation on AFOS, and, like Reitzell once warned about his own music from Hannibal, they're "not something to play alone in the dark while driving!"

Brian Reitzell's score for HANNIBAL is the greatest TV scoring job since Angelo Badalamenti's TWIN PEAKS.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) May 3, 2014

Will Graham deduces why a murdered musician was transformed into a cello in the Hannibal episode "Fromage."

Aside from the occasional use of Bach and Mozart compositions as source cues (Hannibal Lecter may be a cannibal, but his tastes in dinner music lean towards the classy and erudite), Reitzell refrained from conventional melodies for so long that when the time came for Fuller and Reitzell to close the book on Hannibal, Reitzell wanted to say thank you to the show's small but passionate audience--known as the Fannibals--for expressing their love for the show by finally treating them to a conventional melody at the end of "The Wrath of the Lamb," the series finale. The final six episodes of Hannibal were loaded with fan service, whether they were fast-forwarding the series timeline to retell Red Dragon, the 1981 Thomas Harris novel that started it all and introduced Dr. Lecter, heightening the homoerotic tension between Will and Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal (but, as Hannibal regular Scott Thompson points out, never really getting them to consummate it) or gifting the Fannibals with an original song that intriguingly carries several different meanings, from the most obvious one, the bizarre love between Will and his frenemy, to the possibility that the song is also about the post-NBC future of the show itself.

I'm no Goth, and I've never cared for Goths, but I've always liked the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose songs have been discovered by a whole new audience after The Weeknd sampled the band's "Happy House" for "House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls" back in 2011. "Love Crime," Siouxsie Sioux's first recording in eight years, is a perfect way for Reitzell--a Banshees fan who co-wrote the tune with Sioux, a fan of Fuller's show--to musically conclude Hannibal, as well as one of Sioux's best songs, a hypnotic ballad in the mold of "Face to Face," the Siouxsie and the Banshees tune that was such a musical highlight of Batman Returns.

The Sioux/Reitzell tune, which I've added to AFOS rotation this week, is also a far better Bond song than "Writing's on the Wall," Sam Smith's official Bond theme for Spectre. Even though "Love Crime" is a ballad and the "I will survive" refrain is an especially resonant and bittersweet lyric for viewers and TV critics who are heartbroken over NBC's cancellation of Hannibal and are hoping Fuller will get his wish to someday revisit the Harris characters in some form or other, "Love Crime" is thankfully devoid of the sappiness of "Whining's on the Wall."

Like "Face to Face" before it, "Love Crime" feels like the Bond song Sioux always wanted to perform but will never get to because she's too weird for the Top 40 radio-obsessed Broccolis. Sioux isn't quite Sade. Now Sade's the performer I've always wanted for a Bond theme, more so than anyone else, even Sioux--"Smooth Operator" would have been perfect for opening a Roger Moore-era Bond flick--yet the Broccolis have stupidly ignored Sade all these years. But with "Love Crime," Sioux proves she was always worthy to join the likes of Shirley Bassey and Shirley Manson. She and Reitzell also prove what a folly several of the Broccolis' choices for Bond main title themes have been ever since Lulu's voice cracked at the end of 1974's "The Man with the Golden Gun," and that high note Lulu clearly had trouble powering through helped cause "The Man with the Golden Gun," a tune even the late John Barry admitted to being ashamed of producing, to become the first of several main title themes in the Bond catalog that are painful to listen to.

That's not all that "Love Crime" surpasses. Will's confrontation with serial killer Francis Dolarhyde (oddly spelled as Dollarhyde by Michael Mann and played by Tom Noonan) to the tune of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" during 1986's Manhunter--the first time Red Dragon was brought to the screen--remains a classic musical moment in a Mann movie, especially when Iron Butterfly drummer Ron Bushy's drum roll accompanies the William Peterson version of Will badassedly smashing through the window to stop Dollarhyde. Sioux and Reitzell actually recorded "Love Crime" way before "Wrath of the Lamb" episode writers Fuller, Steve Lightfoot and Nick Antosca came up with the scenes "Love Crime" ended up being paired with in the final cut: Will and Hannibal fighting Dolarhyde (now back to one L and played by Richard Armitage) together; a badly wounded Will experiencing a baptism in blood and taking a gutshot Hannibal along with him in his plunge off the cliff; and a drugged Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) being served her own severed and roasted leg by an unknown dinner guest (could that guest be her former patient and partner-in-crime Hannibal?). But after hearing what Sioux and Reitzell accomplished with "Love Crime"--and seeing how beautifully the tune fits with those striking images of Dolarhyde, Will, Hannibal and Bedelia--I prefer "Love Crime" over the drunkenly sung "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" as cathartic music for the defeat of Dolarhyde.

(Photo source: endlessly fascinated)

The lyrics during "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" were always dumb anyway. They're the "I'mma take her ass down when she bring her friend around/Fuck 'em both like ayo" of 20-minute makeout songs for white people. The lyrics are so distractingly inane they make you wish Mann's music editor carved up "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" into an instrumental like how Hannibal carves up his victims for dinner.

Plus "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" doesn't have the aforementioned layers of meaning "Love Crime" carries. In addition to the subject matter of the bond between Will and Hannibal (notice the double meaning of "I will," which could also be interpreted as "I, Will"), "Love Crime" is also about Hannibal and Bedelia. Fuller pointed out to TV critic Alan Sepinwall that "what's so fun is that... we hear [Sioux] say, 'I will survive, I will survive,' as we're pushing in on Bedelia, and that could mean she's singing from Hannibal's perspective and it means he has survived and will eat this woman now, or Bedelia's point of view that it's like, 'You may have cut off this leg, but I've got this fork and I'm gonna do some damage before it's done.'"

"Love Crime" could also be interpreted as an anthem for the show itself and its existence in the "deadly game" known as network TV. I'm amazed that a show with so much gore, cannibalism, dark humor and bizarre dream sequences and such a thoughtful approach to mortality and morality managed to last this long on a network like NBC.

Three seasons are a ripe old age for a Fuller show about the subject of death. It's the longest a Fuller creation has lasted on TV (Wonderfalls, the first time many of us developed a crush on Hannibal regular Caroline Dhavernas, lasted only one season, while Pushing Daisies managed to stay alive for two, just like Dead Like Me, which Fuller also created, but he quit Dead Like Me early on due to creative differences). Fuller, who devised the ending of "The Wrath of the Lamb" so that it could be both a satisfying conclusion and the start of a possible new chapter, may think that "the most interesting chapter of Will Graham's story has yet to be told"--Sioux's "I will survive" refrain is basically what must be playing inside Fuller's head whenever he tantalizes the Fannibals with the possibility of a miniseries or movie where Dancy and Mikkelsen would reprise their roles--but personally, I think Will's story ended at the right point.

Plus the continuation of Hannibal would have gotten in the way of what I think Fuller--who's now showrunning the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and is attempting to revive Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories--is destined for: returning to the franchise that gave him his start, Star Trek, and bringing it back to TV (c'mon, CBS All Access, let Fuller have the conn). Three seasons are the perfect lifespan for shows about serial killers who are superhumanly able to get away with so much heinous shit for so long, as opposed to the 38 seasons of Dexter and the 67 seasons of Criminal Minds. Sometimes the feasts with smaller portions are the better ones.

"Love Crime" is now in rotation during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue." Lakeshore Records will release the Hannibal Season 3 Volume 1 and Volume 2 score albums digitally this Friday and on CD in early 2016, just in time for yesterday's DVD and Blu-ray debut of Hannibal's third and final season.

(Photo source: Eliosu)

Shows I Miss (Already): Key & Peele

Since 2009, the AFOS blog's "Shows I Miss" series has looked back at highly entertaining TV shows that were gone too soon and were too clever to last on commercial TV, from 2003's Keen Eddie to last year's Selfie. Comedy Central's hilarious Key & Peele is the first "Shows I Miss" entry in which the show closed up shop not because of the network but because the stars (who, in Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele's case, also doubled as the lead writers) wanted to move on: over the weekend, Key confirmed that the show's current season, which wrapped up filming last November, is also its last in an exclusive interview with The Wrap, and Peele did the same thing on Twitter.

It's not surprising that Key and Peele are eager to move on and concentrate on film projects like Keanu, which will star the duo and will be directed by Peter Atencio (the same director who brought so much cinematic flair to Key & Peele's sketches in the first four seasons and helped change the perception that sketch comedy should be cheap-looking and visually uninteresting). Last year, Peele told L.A. Weekly, "If our show is to have any kind of legacy, it should be that it didn't go on too long."

Last Friday's series finale announcement is the biggest thing that separates Key & Peele from the sketch comedy show it's often (and sometimes rather unfairly) compared to, the groundbreaking, no-holds-barred Chappelle's Show. Unlike Dave Chappelle, whose "I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes"-style departure from his own hit show was one of the most bizarre exits from a TV show ever, Key and Peele get to end their hit show on their own terms.

If you don't remember the whole controversy over the demise of Chappelle's Show, Chappelle became so upset over seeing white fans of the show laugh at his sketches for the wrong reasons that he didn't come back to finish work on what became known as "the lost episodes." I have a theory for Chappelle's meltdown and subsequent escape from Comedy Central to South Africa: they were actually a cover for himself to go off the grid and do secret agent work nobody--not even his former writing partner Neal Brennan or his family in Ohio--knows about. Chappelle's a secret agent when he's not doing stand-up, which explains why he now has the physique of a black Daniel Craig.

Chappelle's Show became unwatchable without Chappelle's approval on the final cut (one of the lost episodes was a non-comedic, town hall meeting-style--and rather pointless--episode about whether or not Chappelle's opinion that the "Stereotype Pixies" sketch, which triggered his exit, was reinforcing racial stereotypes was right: re-fucking-ally?). Meanwhile, Key & Peele's final season is, fortunately, far from an abomination like that aborted third season of Chappelle's Show was. Some Key & Peele fans might not agree--particularly those who miss the segments where Key and Peele would interact with a studio audience and have also grown tired of the antics of some of the show's few recurring characters, like Peele's Meegan, the petulant millennial afflicted with both vocal fry and lousy movie theater behavior--but Key & Peele is still one of the most consistently funny sketch comedy shows on the air. Last week's ChildFund International commercial parody with Peele as a social worker loosely based on the bearded ChildFund guy, asking viewers to donate fake beards to Third World kids, and the latest Meegan and Andre sketch (is it me or did Peele model Meegan's voice after Mindy Kaling, the current boss of Key and Peele's old MADtv pal Ike Barinholtz?) were both absolute riots.



To the viewers who say they miss Key & Peele's studio audience segments, you do know those segments were sort of a compromise between the show's crew and Comedy Central, right? A behind-the-scenes battle that not many of those Key & Peele viewers seem to be aware of is the battle over the inclusion of studio audience laughter in every sketch: the network insisted on a laugh track, while Key, Peele and Atencio didn't want laughter. In 2013, Atencio discussed on Tumblr his past disagreements with the network over the laughter and said, "Our feeling was that because the sketches had a filmic quality to them, the laughter was distracting, and in a way cheapened the effort we had put into making the sketches work as individual short films." He added, "A lot of our sketches rely on setting up a believable world in often very serious genres and then subverting them, and so having that laughter cut in during an action movie or sci-fi style opening was like pouring ice-water on the viewer."

Key, Peele and Atencio had to continually persuade the network that a laugh track would get in the way of, as Atencio pointed out, "the dialogue, music, and sound-effects, all of which play a role in the comedy in most of our scenes." They ultimately won the battle and came up with a way to include audience laughter without having it intrude on the sketches: laughter would be present only during Key and Peele's hosting segments in front of a live studio audience. But the show actually got even better when it completely did away with the studio audience segments and replaced them with True Detective-style fake road trip scenes between Key and Peele as themselves (ad-libbing to each other just like in the studio audience segments), and it became clear that what Key, Peele and Atencio really wanted to do with the show this whole time was to channel the laugh track-less vibe of sketch comedy movies like Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and the John Landis flicks Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women on the Moon.

To me, Key, Peele and Atencio's preference for the absence of often annoying audience laughter is as great a legacy as the show's smartly written satire about racially motivated police harassment of black men and other racial issues (like the "Negrotown" musical number, which bashes everything from racist bankers to cultural appropriation) or the unique--and unapologetically nerdy--comedic voice of two biracial comedians. Key & Peele's experiment of abolishing laugh tracks from filmed sketch comedy has caused other Comedy Central sketch shows like Kroll Show and Inside Amy Schumer to follow suit, which is a thing of beauty. I hate laugh tracks. Why do I need to be told when to laugh? They never made sense when Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Daphne and Velma were getting chased around by ghosts to the sound of canned laughter, and they never made sense now.



Another one of Key & Peele's charms was that it wasn't trying to be Chappelle's Show (speaking of which, here's why some of us former Chappelle's Show viewers are still a little frustrated with Chappelle's abrupt exit: his departure was responsible for the increased presence of the unfunny and racist Mind of Mencia on Comedy Central's schedule, as well as the network's annoying attempts to market the neo-conservative Mind as the next Chappelle's Show). I like the film writing of Kartina Richardson, but her complaints during Key & Peele's first season that Key and Peele are "black folk who want to move past race" and that the show's writing is tepid in comparison to Chappelle's no-holds-barred material and it "makes fun of blacks in a way white liberals will allow themselves to enjoy, under the guise of 'talking about race'" were really weird complaints, especially when race is frequently on the minds of both Peele, who's been working on a script for a horror flick he wants to make about "the fears of being a black man today," and Key (Richardson's negative review of Key & Peele is over at Salon, but I don't want to link to Salon because that site is as slow and laggy as Wendell trudging through a brony convention). In those earlier seasons, Key & Peele was interesting precisely because it wasn't another Chappelle's Show: the obsessions of Key, Peele and Atencio ("Labyrinth. That's my world. NeverEnding Story. Willow," said Peele to White Teeth author Zadie Smith in the New Yorker) are mostly different from those of Chappelle and Neal Brennan's. But Key & Peele eventually did dive into the kind of edgier material about race that Richardson felt the show lacked--like "Negrotown" and the Trayvon Martin-related sketch that opened "Les Mis," the show's third-season premiere--and it ended up excelling at that kind of material.

There is one area where Key & Peele definitely surpassed Chappelle's Show (besides the five seasons Key & Peele will now have amassed), and that would be the fact that it got a few non-black comedians of color some extra screen time on largely vanilla Comedy Central. For instance, Filipino American improv comic Eugene Cordero appeared a few times on Key & Peele, which is better than Chappelle's Show's weird casting of either extremely wooden Asian non-actors or what I assume to be relatives of Chappelle's Asian wife as Asian characters and SNL's continuing practice of casting white actors as Asians. You bet your ass it's offensive and lame whenever the white comedians on SNL play Asians, even without yellowface or brownface makeup. Occasionally, Key has played South Asian characters on the show--like that Indian pediatrician in the unsettling "Make-a-Wish" Halloween sketch with Lauren Lapkus--even though he's neither South nor Asian, but he's actually convincing and non-offensive as an Indian guy (perhaps the reason why Key doesn't sound like Hari Kondabolu's priceless description of Apu as "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father" is due to help from his wife, a dialect coach).

Key & Peele did a few other things better than SNL, like any of Key & Peele's sketches about Barack Obama, which wouldn't have existed had Lorne Michaels chosen Peele to bring his impression of the President to SNL (Peele once said, "I had some good friends over there, and a great meeting with Lorne and they asked me to do it, but I couldn't go for contractual reasons. I was on MADtv... It was a whole fiasco. It was such a shame, SNL is one of my favorite shows of all time"). The sketches with Peele as Obama and Key as his "anger translator" Luther may be viral sensations, but my favorite Key & Peele Obama sketch is "Obama: The College Years," mainly because of the way it makes fun of terrible, subtle-as-an-anvil dialogue in historical dramas like that cheesy line Joely Richardson had to say in The Patriot (Mel Gibson: "May I sit with you?" Richardson: "It's a free country. Or at least it will be").



The little visual touches Atencio came up with for the degraded early '80s videotape look of the fake footage of young Obama are a good example of Atencio's visual flair. That flair and Peele's nerdy love of horror movies were integral to another highlight of Key & Peele's run: the show's ability to pull off horror genre parody sketches that were genuinely unnerving in addition to being funny. The aforementioned "Make-a-Wish" sketch is especially unnerving. It features a creepy performance by Peele as an evil kid whose dying wishes are more elaborate than "I wish I could be Batman." Peele seems to be particularly obsessed with Thomas Harris adaptations like Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs and the Hannibal TV show, which explains why the Harris Cannibalistic Universe inspired not one but two sketches: "Hall of Mirrors," featuring Peele as a serial killer who's got Francis Dolarhyde's cleft lip, Ted Levine's voice and Joe Isuzu's inability to lie effectively, and "Sex Detective," which has Peele playing a brooding, Will Graham-like criminal profiler in a dead-on spoof of the masturbatory overtones of loner detectives like the occasionally Graham-like Fox Mulder, whose love of beating the meat was hinted at on The X-Files (extra points for the casting of former Criminal Minds star Paget Brewster as another detective).

"Sex Detective" is so dead-on that it's forever ruined the HCU for me. Thanks to "Sex Detective," Hannibal's pilot episode remains the only Hannibal episode I've watched because I know I won't be able to watch the rest of Hannibal without thinking of Peele's MacGruber-ish moans from "Sex Detective" and chuckling. That's how terrific a Key & Peele genre spoof like "Sex Detective" is: it has the power to ruin whole genres, just like how Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was so brutal in skewering musician biopic clichés that it caused me to be unable to take any musician biopic seriously anymore.

The intensity of Key & Peele's horror sketches, whether that sketch is "Make-a-Wish," the explanation for Steve Urkel's dominance on Family Matters or either of the Thomas Harris spoofs, sheds light on one last standout thing about Key & Peele: the two stars are excellent actors in addition to being great comedic minds (Zadie Smith points out that "If the depth Key brings to comic moments is unexpected, the bigger surprise is that he's doing comedy at all: he intended to be a classical actor"). So many of last week's negative reviews about the Adam Sandler blockbuster Pixels have noted that Sandler sleepwalks through the movie. In other words, the energy level Sandler once had in his earliest comedic vehicles--and in more challenging and risky movies like Punch-Drunk Love, in which Sandler movie fan Paul Thomas Anderson got a career-best performance out of Sandler--is completely gone. On Key & Peele, neither Key nor Peele could ever be guilty of such a thing. They acted their asses off in every sketch, and that sort of commitment to whatever material comes their way is something studio comedy filmmaking could really use right now. Comedy Central's latest loss is now studio comedy filmmaking's gain.

Why so many damn '80s songs about heartbeats?

I heard King Crimson's "Heartbeat" on Radio Nigel recently, and it got me thinking the above question.

Pop songwriters must have really been out of ideas in the '80s, a decade that gave us such gems as Reaganomics, widespread Asian-bashing humor, crappy sitcoms featuring creepy little girl robots and wisecracking babies who share a roof with third-rate stand-up comics who think Bullwinkle impressions are the height of comedy, and of course, overly earnest power ballads about heartbeats.

Manhunter is my favorite movie based on a Thomas Harris novel, but the one thing that dates that movie is Red 7's very '80s closing credits theme, also entitled "Heartbeat." Michael Mann has great musical tastes (I'm looking forward to the Public Enemies soundtrack), but I don't get his love for Red 7's "Heartbeat," which he used in both the original Miami Vice and Manhunter.

Okay, I somewhat get it. Joan Allen listened to a tiger's heartbeat earlier in the movie, hence "Heartbeat." But otherwise, I'm not feelin' the song.

And somebody at the "Heartbeat" video shoot should have told the Red 7 lead singer, "Dude, the mullet's not gonna cover up the fact that you're balding."

Or "Hey, party in the back, dying lawn up top."

Speaking of things dying, Don Johnson's "Heartbeat"--his attempt to launch a singing career during Miami Vice's run--makes me die inside. It was the lamest of 25 videos Jon Stewart, Denis Leary, Janeane Garofalo and Chris Kattan literally destroyed during MTV's legendary and unlikely-to-be-rerun-again 25 Lame special in 1999. In the case of "Heartbeat," Leary and Kattan destroyed the channel's master copy of the Johnson video by stuffing it in a blender. The four hosts' commentary during "Heartbeat" was one of many highlights of 25 Lame. (What's the difference between 25 Lame and the countless VH1 Awesomely Bad Videos specials it spawned? 25 Lame was funny.)

An agony booth recapper wrote that when they watched "Heartbeat," "the comedians were mostly sitting in stunned silence. Was this post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the Vanilla Ice [baseball bat] incident? Or were they just completely stupefied and confounded by what they were watching?" Actually, they weren't mostly silent. I remember they got in a few good lines about the Miami Vice star's overdramatic lip-syncing, the constant footage of exploding stuff and the baffling storyline (Johnson as a war photographer who's into dead terrorist chicks? Huh?).

The one '80s heartbeat song I like isn't a power ballad. It's Taana Gardner's funky and frequently sampled "Heartbeat" from 1981. Otherwise, like I said, '80s pop tunesmiths must have really been out of ideas. The fact that I'm blogging about this means I'm out of ideas too.