Reasons to Love Toronto Now: because the best-looking show on TV is filmed here

The nightmarish shadows, bleak landscapes and stomach-churning crime scenes of NBC’s Hannibal are all the more disturbing because of their vague familiarity—dead bodies arranged into a grisly totem pole on the beach by the Scarborough Bluffs, say, or a corpse strung up in a tree in the parking lot of Canada’s Wonderland. Usually when there’s a murder, the show’s charismatic forensic psychiatrist and serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, throws an elaborate dinner party. Hannibal the Cannibal adores entertaining, and the camera loves to linger on the ghoulish feasts he prepares from the body parts of his victims. Janice Poon, the Toronto food stylist in charge of designing the meals, is a genius at creating luxurious dishes that are equal parts appetizing and repugnant, seductive and threatening. Is that meltingly tender osso buco or a human shank? The characters’ voracious appetites often supersede their nagging suspicions. Because Hannibal is a charming man. And he cooks like the devil.