I just read the Hannibal pilot, available here, and then watched it (streaming on Amazon). It was written by Bryan Fuller, based on characters created by Thomas Harris, and it reminded me of The Nick Carraway problem, because Fuller and Harris don’t have it.
Psychopaths are interesting, in a clinical way, because they look like us but run on a whole other operating system. To examine the character of Hannibal, Fuller could have chosen a Nick Carraway version of Will Graham, but he knew that that was only half the story engine.
Instead, he chose the polar opposite of a psychopath, a man tortured by his own empathy. That tension is a perpetual motion machine of a story engine.
Nick Carraways are the boneless center of spec scripts. They are bystanders. Don’t Nick.