Clarice Season 2: Silence of the Lambs Spinoff Series Heading to Paramount+

The second season of the long-awaited Clarice — a spinoff of The Silence of the Lambs — will head to Paramount+. The series, which launched in February on CBS, has had a long and ever-changing road to the airwaves, which began in 2017 and changed producers and networks several times. The series centers on Clarice Starling, the character played by Josie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs film franchise. The news broke yesterday that both Clarice and the David Boreanaz-fronted SEAL Team would move from conventional terrestrial TV on CBS to the streaming service formerly known as CBS All Access.

Both Clarice and SEAL Team averaged more than 6 million viewers per episode this season — solid numbers; for context, that’s almost 2 million more viewers than NBC’s Hannibal had at its peak, and that show and Clarice are presumably drawing from largely the same pool of potential viewers. It seems the key motivation behind the move wasn’t that they were underperforming, but more that CBS needed some room on the schedule to try new pilots, since it renewed most of its primetime lineup.

CBS series picked up for the 2021-2022 TV season include Blue Bloods, Bull, FBI, FBI: Most Wanted, Magnum P.I., and both of the network’s NCIS series. The network also ordered a pair of new series already, Smallwood and Good Sam. The network plans to unveil its full fall schedule to advertisers during a network upfront presentation on Wednesday. Paramount+, meanwhile, is already mining recently-concluded CBS shows like CSI and Criminal Minds for follow-up series on streaming.

Clarice is the latest live-action adaptation based on the best-selling novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. Prior adaptations set in the world of the book include Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the The Silence of the Lambs trilogy starring Foster and Anthony Hopkins, and the fan-favorite TV series Hannibal. The series picks up about a year after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, when Clarice Starling returns to the field after her run-in with Hannibal Lecter.

The series stars Rebecca Breeds as the titular character, along with Lucca De Oliveira, Devyn A. Tyler, Kal Penn, Nick Sandow, Michael Cudlitz, and Marnee Carpenter.