Last year, Dexter became one of the series to help put Showtime on the map. Dexter (along with Weeds) has helped make the premium channel a major competitor to HBO. I discovered the series (and immediately became addicted to it) when I was still living in Los Angeles.
Based on “Darkly Dreaming Dexter,” a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, Dexter is easily the darkest series I’ve ever seen on television. The show stars Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under) as Dexter Morgan, a blood-splatter analyst for the Miami Police Department, who also happens to moonlight as a sociopath serial killer. Given the premise, the series is undeniably bloody and violent, but surprisingly not gratuitous – the series is character-driven with brilliantly woven mystery plots. An idiosyncratic brand of ironic humor gives the series a certain surreal quality, but also keeps the occasionally monstrous characters altogether human.
Bu what makes the show palatable is that Dexter only kills “bad guys” – that is, he only kills other serial killers. Somewhat hypocritical perhaps, but we learn early on in the series that something in Dexter’s mysterious past changed him forever, leading him to violence. When Harry Morgan, a Miami cop, adopted him, he trained the young Dexter to track only repeat violent criminals who had fallen through the cracks of the justice system. Years later, Dexter has eliminated dozens of violent criminals from the streets of Miami.
With relatively short seasons (12 episodes), the series casts well-developed season-long story-arcs that keep the series completely addictive. With each episode, a few questions may be answered, but for every mystery that’s resolved, another one takes its place.
The inaugural season centered around another Miami area serial killer, dubbed the “Ice Truck Killer,” who seemed to be tailing Dexter – only in the final episode do we learn the Ice Truck Killer’s history and true identity. Now, in the second season, Dexter finds himself under the microscope when a couple of scuba divers discover his cache of bodies he left dumped in the bay.
The first season of Dexter is available on DVD, and the series is currently in its second season on Showtime, Sunday nights at 9 p.m. But with the writers’ strike continuing, networks are seeking out original programming, and Dexter is one candidate for network broadcast. CBS, a corporate sibling of Showtime, may repurpose the popular series to fill in for its other crime series for early 2008.
Elizabeth “Liz” Gartley, of Houlton, has a BA in media studies from Emerson College in Boston. She has studied abroad in the Netherlands and Australia, and most recently interned at a production company in Hollywood. She can be reached online at egartley@gmail.com or leave a message for her at your local newspaper office.
By Liz Gartley 
