Best Oscar Dresses 2009

During the writers’ strike a few seasons ago, CBS experimented with rerunning Showtime’s Dexter in primetime. The episodes were edited for broadcast, and while they raised unsurprising protests over a major network airing a show whose protagonist is a serial killer, the problem in the end was that a dark, pay-cable drama is a better fit on a dark, pay-cable network, where it can be as dark and pay-cable as it needs to be.

It’s now 2012, and struggling NBC is run by Robert Greenblatt, who used to run Showtime. (You can thank or blame him for Smash, which he developed there.) And Greenblatt’s latest bold move is to order straight to series, skipping the pilot process, a drama about a serial killer: cannibal Hannibal Lecter, in a series set in the era of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon.