ABSTRACT
One of the many points of convergence between television and adaptation is the thorny issue of attributing authorship. If, as Richard Corliss and Steven Price have suggested, film has repeatedly sought to establish an author in order to transform cinema from entertainment into art, television has suffered from similar ills. The show repeatedly evokes the presence of film in general, and Psycho in particular, insisting on its own status as an adaptation, a reinvention of previously extant material. The series seem to be expanding and redefining our understanding of what television is, or can be. Hannibal takes on a certain number of stereotypical tropes of the TV procedural, in order to turn them on their head. In many transmedia television texts a sense of authorship is not necessarily attributed to an individual but instead to the larger production and broadcasting institutions behind those individuals.
