Trivia / Clarice

• Accidental Downer Ending: The series ends with one of these, both in the present and in the flashback. By the final episode of its first and only season, Clarice Starling had been removed from the ViCAP team and goes rogue in order to stop The Conspiracy, and by the time the closing credits roll, she's still not been reinstated. In the flashback, we last see a young Clarice with a gun held to her head by a criminal gang; while she obviously escapes (otherwise neither the events of The Silence of the Lambs nor this series would happen), we don't learn exactly how she did it, or how it shaped her as a person. And we never will, since the series was never picked up for a Season 2.
• Channel Hop: Attempted and disastrously failed. According to Deadline Hollywood, ViacomCBS noted the series had an outsized digital viewership and, alongside SEAL Team and Evil, decided to shift it from CBS to Paramount+ for its second season. However, Clarice producer MGM was apparently unsatisfied with the concessions made by CBS Studios and ultimately rejected the move. As CBS had already set its fall lineup by the time the negotiations broke down, this has doomed Clarice to cancellation after a single season.
• Fake American: Australian Rebecca Breeds plays American Clarice.
• Quietly Cancelled: After the deal to move the show to Paramount+ fell through, Clarice's first season ended up being its last. By this point, there was no longer any room in CBS' schedule for Clarice and it wasn't faring particularly well in ratings, so a second season was simply never produced without any official announcement that the show had been cancelled.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The show is intended to be a sequel to the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs, but as the De Laurentiis Company owns the rights to the character of Hannibal Lecter, Clarice wasn't allowed to feature the character or even mention him by name (though they did find ways to reference Hannibal). The writers also couldn't feature any plotlines or characters from the franchise outside of The Silence of the Lambs and its movie adaptation because of this. ^note NBC's Hannibal faced the opposite issue where in it couldn't feature Clarice Starling or directly adapt The Silence of the Lambs because MGM holds the rights, although as Hannibal was originally pitched as a prequel leading up to the events of Red Dragon, it didn't matter so much
• What Could Have Been:
  • It was announced in 2012 that Lifetime would be developing a television series centered around Clarice Starling, though it fell into Development Hell for nearly a decade before being revived by CBS.
  • Clarice was originally intended to have a second season, especially with a few storylines (particularly the stuff regarding Clarice's childhood) being left unresolved by the end of the first season. The show would've been moved from CBS to Paramount+ for Season 2, but after negotiations between CBS and MGM fell through, the show wound up being cancelled instead.

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