Dexter

Dexter (season two)

While "Dexter" most closely resembles a police procedural, tonally it has more in common with the overarching theme of death that has hovered over TV throughout the Bush administration -- Michael C. Hall's previous "Six Feet Under" and "Dead Like Me." Its deadpan comic tone could be off-putting to some -- not to mention the morally questionable sympathy we feel for a serial killer who justifies his killings -- but there's more to the show than the artfully conceived murders and plot tensions. While its main concern is those who are unable to feel -- it uses father-son psychological simplicity to explain Dexter's need to murder -- it also touches on topicality with degrees of restraint, such as the episode where a former special ops homicide detective has a confrontation with a fellow former operative who's been "fucked-up" by his military service. It also has some kind of idea as to the reality of single life, dating, and relationships -- spanning from giggling children to hook-ups in gyms, and when it concerns inter-generational dating it's decidedly mature.

While its cleverness distances itself from human emotion, it attempts, theoretically, to deal with spiritual deadness. And while my own feeling is that the show doesn't attain the spiritual heights it occasionally ponders about (and while sometimes it uses Dexter's past father-son experience as too much of a present-day indicator) it nevertheless remains thoroughly entertaining as a not-quite-genre piece.

As with "Prison Break" it introduces an FBI investigator who livens up the show, although as opposed to the intensity provided by William Fichtner in the former, the agent on "Dexter" is played with relaxed, breezy intelligence, and -- dare I say -- sexiness, a characterization of a father-type figure to Dexter's sister, who muses on the perfection of Chopin and takes time to pause and reflect on exactly which animal cracker he's pulled out of the box. (It came as a complete shock to me when I looked up the actor and discovered it was Keith Carradine; in my head I've always associated Carradine with the shapeless grit of '70s genre movies. It's a perfect example of an actor surprising you and exposing your own narrow-mindedness -- he's extraordinary.)

In the second season, which I've just finished, the show both smartly, and to its detriment, moves away from the mechanics of Dexter's killing and into the idea of "love" and its implications, for the majority of the characters: Dexter's relationship with his girlfriend; his girlfriend's relationship with her mother; Dexter's sister's relationship with Carradine; their boss's relationship with Sgt. Doakes. It serves to bring Dexter's murders close to those around him, and in the process slowly begins to lose the distance the series began with. As Dexter begins to feel, sloppiness ensues; the actions of those around him are affected. The genre ingenuity of the show may not be sustaining in and of itself; with the new, more personal aspect even scenes with Dexter's girlfriend and her mother maintain interest.

We also begin to question the morality of Dexter's actions, even though the show somewhat sneakily allows Dexter to remain a hero while evading his captors. Throughout the show I've never really felt relief from one of Dexter's kills, and I've never really felt complicit, either; but with the storyline of his psychotic girlfriend the writers have effectively provided the first death that we've, as an audience, been anticipating and hoping for; through her annoying British accent and her crazy-bitch conniving she's provided a foil for Dexter that we can't help but despise. There's a difference between what the show's writers do here and what, say, Tobe Hooper does in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" -- in that film, he makes his characters so annoying that you want them to be murdered, even though they're innocents. To my mind that's revolting; what the show's writers are doing with "Dexter" is essentially what Shakespeare had done hundreds of years ago, use death as a nasty punishment for someone who had it coming.