Did you watch the visually sumptuous premiere of NBC’s Hannibal? Did you recognize a certain bathroom almost identical to a certain bathroom from The Shining? Congratulations, you receive an eagle eye badge! Now here’s showrunner Bryan Fuller breaking down the Stanley Kubrick homage to EW: “I’ve been wanting to do the bathroom [set] forever. I tried to do it several times on Pushing Daisies but we always had budget restrictions and I wanted it to be exactly like that bathroom. Every show I’ve done I wanted to build a bathroom that looked like that space. What’s so remarkable about it is it’s a purely psychological space. … It’s like they dipped the entire set in blood. … I understood watching it as a 10-year-old that this was psychological storytelling.” And somehow this man hasn’t seen Room 237 yet.
Fuller says the Kubrick vibe was “absolutely” intentional. “[Director] David Slade and I had long conversations about the Kubrick-ian feel of this show. We are telling the story of a man who makes his living with his imagination who slowly loses his mind over the course of the season,” Fuller says. “We are telling a version of [The Shining], except the guy is not an alcoholic.”
