NBC's Hannibal is gearing up for another season of gruesome murders and disturbing culinary concoctions, but fans should be prepared for the story to take a sharp turn from Thomas Harris' original novels.

Series creator Bryan Fuller made this deviation fairly clear when he shocked viewers by reversing Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) and Will Graham's (Hugh Dancy) fates at the end of season one but, despite this, Fuller plans on keeping enough of the original work intact to make the narrative recognizable.

"Every season is its own novel, so there are three novels that existed before Red Dragon," Fuller told Crave Online. "We told the first novel in the first season, and then the second novel has a completely different flavor and structure and style of storytelling that still remains the show, but we shift everything so dramatically that it keeps the audience on their toes because they now don't know what to expect. Because we've departed so significantly from what they know in the literature."

One of the hold over from the original material will be a character that is similar to Barney Matthews. Unfortunately, the NBC series could not obtain the rights to Barney nor schedule the original actor, Frankie Faison, but Fuller assures viewers that there will be "a Barney-like character in Season 2," according to Crave Online. However, instead of dealing with Hannibal himself, the new Barney will interact with a presumably less dangerous Graham.

As for The Red Dragon, Fuller is still working on how and when that plot with thread it's way through the TV program, but it looks like that story will come to pass in either season 3 or 4.

Hannibal returns to NBC on Feb. 28 at 10 p.m. ET. Click the video below to view the end of the season 1 finale, "Savoureux."

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Hannibal, Nbc, Television