Ever since I started watching The Sopranos I guess five or six years ago, I’ve watched and marveled at the way the creative arc of what we might call the high-form premium cable drama has been to plumb further and further into deviance, pathology and taboo and yet still pull out characters and worlds a mass viewership can identify with and love. Sopranos was the first move into this space: the brutal mobster in psychotherapy. But of course the mob drama as a refraction of and escape from the American scene has a long history.
Then, I remember, after the smash success of The Sopranos seeing HBO start hyping its new show Six Feet Under, a show about a family of undertakers. I remember seeing the previews for it and it seemed like a cliche of what we expect from brain-dead studio execs who’ve stumbled on a good thing: try to reproduce the magic with a hamfisted and soul-killing version of what worked the first time. So, if a show about a neurotic mobster murderer hit big, how about a drama about a dysfunctional family running a funeral home? If death sells, how about double-death?
But then Six Feet Under, for my money at least, turned out to be one of the best, arguably even the best (though I’m not sure I’d quite give it that superlative) television series ever created.
Even so, I had a similar feeling when I saw that Showtime had picked up Six Feet’s Michael C. Hall for Dexter, an oddly comic drama in which the protoganist is a serial 
killer — clearly the dramtic Everest on the terrain of humanizing the vile or socially shamed.
(Hall was David, the gay brother in Six Feet.)
Now, this would seem hard to pull off. After all, while serial killers get a bad press, most of us tend to believe it is deserved. But it is an amazingly good show. And I have to confess that I fell under its spell after one episode. And I’ve pined through each week waiting for the next episode.
(I missed the live airing of this week’s. But then Sunday was our first day home with our new son. And, did anyone else know about this whole crying thing?)
The preview bills Dexter Morgan as a ‘vigilante serial killer’, which struck me as an odd billing when I first read it. But he’s a real serial killer, a true sociopath, though some elements or emerging elements of his personality might not fit the clinical definition, a man with a driving compulsion to dissect humans. He works as a blood spatter expert for the Miami PD. But by night, or rather on his own time, he finds people like himself, sociopaths and habitual murderers, to kill.
The concept behind the show is that Dexter’s adoptive father, a MPD homicide detective, spotted his son’s predilections at a young age — remorselessness, inability to grasp basic human emotions and emotional idioms, killing small animals — and helped him channel his nascent serial killer-dom into the at least quasi-acceptable form of killing people society would do better off without.
Getting creeped out yet?
I understand. I probably would too before I’d seen the show. But it’s very, very good. One of the treats of the show is the way the writers play with allowing us to see the world through the eyes of a damaged sociopathic personality, the alienation from basic human interactions, the inability to understand them, like going through life hearing the libretto of human existence without any of the score or the cues.
If you’ve seen the show you know about Rita, the Ice Truck killer, Dexter’s, I guess you’d call him his rival and nemesis, and all the rest.
But tell me: have you seen Dexter? Do you like it? I’m eager to hear from other Dexter-philes. Drop me a line.
