The title character of the television show Hannibal, a psychiatrist and a cannibalistic serial killer, uses the bodies of his victims to create art installations, both as sculptures and as food. The show uses a sophisticated, high-society protagonist to juxtapose murder and art. It does so by playing with the audiences in front of which status is enacted: while crime is presented diegetically, the art is not, that is, the audience is witness to the art and the murder, while the other characters see only the murder; this happens within a frame in which, of course, the show itself as art is also (almost necessarily) a non-diegetic presentation, aimed only at us. Thus, the show manages to play with the status ascriptions around murder and art and thus shows how the front-stage talk about murder is contradicted continuously by the reception of the show: by emphasizing a putative opposition between status markers in the interplay between critical attention and production commentary, it shows a near-complete convergence of these status markers in its non-verbalized production imagery. This allows wider insights in how status is communicated in open and veiled manners.