Showrunner Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (NBC, 2013–) is a disturbingly sumptuous exploration of Dr Hannibal Lecter’s time as a practicing psychiatrist and cannibal who befriends and counsels Will Graham, an FBI investigator with an “empathy disorder” that he uses to profile serial killers. This paper uses Hannibal as a case study to critically examine how the experiences of empathy and psychopathology are communicated to television audiences, and how audiences are invited to empathise with screen characters. The TV series attributes Graham’s augmented capacity for empathy to having “too many mirror neurons” and presents his empathic abilities as a psychological disorder located “closer to Asperger’s and autistics than narcissists and sociopaths.” By foregrounding the role of imagination in constructing and inhabiting another person’s reality, the series positions empathy as crucial to Graham’s professional and personal life, yet it also suggests that acute empathy results in a painful emotional overload that impedes social engagement. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology and the emerging fields of neurocinematics and psychocinematics, I investigate how aesthetic choices and screen technologies function to construct the experiences of television characters and invite the audience to inhabit the subjective realms of people with mental illnesses. I argue that television’s long-running character arcs afford the opportunity to establish significant empathic insight that may operate to train perceptual attunement, yet Hannibal’s first season not only reveals the ethical benefits of empathy, it also lays bare empathy’s ill-understood potential for negative affect.