Mads Mikkelsen wears a Zenith El Primero

Mads Mikkelsen plays Hannibal Lecter as a man who dresses to be looked at: a glen-check suit, a paisley tie in a full knot. Nothing he wears is an accident. Bryan Fuller's Hannibal ran on NBC from 2013 to 2015 and made the most cultured cannibal in fiction into a study in taste, where the costume carries as much of the character as the dialogue. Under the cuff, on a leather strap, sits a steel chronograph.

The watch is a Zenith El Primero, a Swiss chronograph whose name is Spanish for "the first." Zenith unveiled the movement on January 10, 1969, and staked that name on the claim: the first automatic chronograph, though Seiko and a Heuer-Breitling consortium announced theirs the same year. What set it apart was frequency. The movement beats at 36,000 vibrations an hour and times an event to a tenth of a second, the highest beat rate in a production chronograph of its day. It is a connoisseur's watch, not a famous one, the kind only another owner recognizes. Steel versions run several thousand dollars new.

So a chronograph built to split a second into tenths rides on the wrist of a man who is never in a hurry: a host who cooks for hours, a killer no one thinks to suspect. The screen-used piece, stainless steel on a leather strap, sold through Propstore with a certificate of authenticity. It came from the first-season episode "Oeuf," the one NBC pulled from its American broadcast for a plot about abducted children made to kill their families.