Since Hannibal hit Netflix last month, a lot of people have been discovering it for the first time, while others are using it as a convenient excuse for a rewatch. I saw a fellow Tor co-worker refer to it as comfort television, and was started to realize I agree. This is a brilliant, difficult, graphically violent show about serial killing, but yes, watching it is relaxing.
A day later I saw a discussion about works of art that define different eras, with the poster positing that Hamilton was the defining work of the Obama era. That made me wonder about the defining works of our current era, and the more I let the question jangle through my brainmeat the more I came back to Hannibal—although the show is a few years old (originally airing 2013-15), it seems to be coming into its own now in a way it never did while it was on NBC. But the more I thought about, a second answer bobbed to the surface, and revealed a startling truth: The defining works of art of this era tell the same story, and those two works are Hannibal and Steven Universe.
