Red Reacts: KSL Pulls Hannibal

On Monday it was announced that KSL-TV was going to pull the NBC series Hannibal from it's regular lineup.  In a statement, Tami Ostmark, KSL's vice president of marketing, research and promotion said, "After this last week's episode, it just had too much graphic content for us."  "It was just too bloody and violent.  "This is beyond anything we've put on our station before. This is too graphic to be on regular TV. It should be a cable show. We've talked to NBC, and that's how we feel about it."

KSL pulling network shows from it's lineup is not new for the channel.  Last year, KSL chose to pull The New Normal from it's lineup, saying "dialogue might be excessively rude and crude. The scenes may be too explicit or the characterizations might seem offensive... For our brand, this program feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time."  Other shows KSL has chosen to pull include the American version of Coupling, The Playboy Club, Poker After Dark, and Saturday Night Live.

What strikes me about this choice by KSL is the timing of it.  KSL made the decision to pull The New Normal from it's lineup before the series started airing.  The same can be said of The Playboy Club, Coupling, and Poker After Dark.  However, in the case of Hannibal, four episodes of the show had already aired on KSL before they made their announcement.  The amount of blood and violence in Hannibal was evident to many critics was evident upon viewing of the pilot of the show.  If the people who run KSL had viewed the pilot of Hannibal, as they presumably had in the case of The New Normal, wouldn't they have found objection to it then?  Or, as I suspect, did the people who run KSL not even watch the pilot of The New Normal, and made their decision based on the synopsis of the series?

KSL deciding to not air content that they find objectionable is why I, a paying consumer, have decided to, if I can, get my television content through online providers, such as Hulu.  Why should I be reliant on other people to decide what TV shows I do and do not get to watch?  Why shouldn't I, as a consumer, make the decisions on my own?  This motivation is why I watched the entire first season of The New Normal on Hulu, as well as many other series that I can find on that service.  This motivation is also why I sought out the pilot of Hannibal on Hulu.  After viewing the pilot of Hannibal, I chose not to watch the show any further due to the blood and violence that was in the pilot episode.  That was a choice that I made.  Me.  Not KSL.