TV Review: Dexter

For the past year or so, everyone and their mom has been telling me to watch the show Dexter. They would say things like, "It's so darkly funny," or "It's got such a great concept," or "It's got the coolest opening theme." Well, finally one of my friends sat me down and essentially forced me to watch a couple episodes of Dexter, and I was immediately addicted. That night, I downloaded the first two seasons, and about 3 weeks later I'm done with them and ready to write a glowing review.

Everyone and their mom is right about Dexter: it is, for lack of better words, absolutely fucking bomb. For those of you unfamiliar with it, its eponymous main character is a good-natured guy who cares for his girlfriend and sister and is well-liked by everyone in the Miami police department, where he works as a blood analyst. He also has a hobby that no one knows about: he's a serial killer. His adoptive father, a cop, taught him how to kill people when he realized that Dexter was not going to be able to control his urges. His complex moral code can essentially be boiled down to: "Don't get caught" and "only kill people who deserve it." At the beginning of the first season, Dexter is able to successfully keep his outward appearance and his huge secret entirely separate from each other and lead two lives that influence each other but never mix together. That's the back story.

The TV series was based on a series of novels, and as a result the seasons are structured like novels in a series; each season tells one story with the same characters, and each episode is like a chapter in that story, usually ending either on a positive note or with a cliffhanger. In season 1, the Miami police department is investigating a murderer known as "The Ice Truck Killer," who freezes his bodies before displaying them in elaborate ways for the police to find. Dexter senses that the killer is somehow connected to him and knows about his secret, and as the mystery comes closer to being solved more and more of Dexter's secrets come close to surfacing. Season 2 raises the stakes even more; it begins with scuba divers finding the bodies of all of Dexter's victims and the police investigating Dexter without realizing it, collaborating with the very person they're trying to catch. These stories put incredible twists on the genre of detective fiction. In most detective stories, we're trying to figure out who committed the crime and why they did it, and we want nothing more than for the detectives to uncover the entire story. In Dexter, however, we don't want Dexter to be found out; we want the detectives to be led down the wrong path, and we want to see how that ends up happening. Season 1 is a brilliant piece of detective fiction. When we first realize that the Ice Truck Killer knows about Dexter, we don't know who the killer actually is. We want to find out why the killer knows Dexter's secret, but at the same time we don't want the secret to get out. Because of this, rather than hoping for one explanation of the crime, the audience of Dexter is led to hope for two explanations: a real one for the viewers, and a fake one for the detectives. While the audience wonders what the Ice Truck Killer's real story is, they also wonder how the detectives will figure it out in a different way that doesn't involve Dexter. To make matters even more interesting, the Ice Truck Killer's identity is revealed to the audience (but none of the characters on the show) about halfway through the first season. So about halfway through the story our method of watching and solving shifts from trying to figure out who the killer is to trying to figure out how and why he or she (I wouldn't want to give anything away) is killing, and how the detectives will be led to the killer eventually. Season 1 is suspenseful, intriguing, and incredibly well-written.

But season 1 looks like nothing more than a classic whodunnit in comparison to season 2, which is more of a bizarre, fucked up psychological drama involving adultery, guilt, failure, a character with kind of a reverse Oedipus complex (I don't know if there's a psychological term for when a woman wants to have sex with her father), and an incredibly intricate web of lies that is simultaneously woven and torn apart by every single character. Season 2 toys with the audience's emotions; episode 3 ends with everything being seemingly resolved, but the last episode begins with the audience wondering which innocent characters' lives will be destroyed because of Dexter's actions. This is because, as stated before, season 2 revolves around Dexter's victims being investigated. It's another example of a murder mystery where we want to see what the fake solution will be; we want to see how the facts will point to someone else taking the blame. In the end, someone else does take the blame, and it raises a lot of questions about morality; while an innocent person's life and reputation are forever ruined, is it worth it for Dexter's sister and girlfriend to have their lives and reputations be saved? Ultimately Dexter is not the one we're worried about; we're worried about those who are close to him, and by the end we're wondering if it would be better for Dexter to turn himself in. Season 1 and 2 are very different; while I was incredibly satisfied with the end of season 1, the end of season 2 left me very uneasy. But that's the point. As said before, season 1, which is on its own very complex, looks like a straightforward murder mystery compared to season 2, which is a journey into the human psyche and a brutal look at morality.

But while Dexter is definitely heavily influenced by murder mysteries, it is also a very character-driven drama. In most detective stories, characters fit certain archetypes, and they don't have any purpose in the story other than leading the detective to find out who the killer is. This couldn't be farther from what Dexter is like. Some of my favorite stories are ones where the writers created a bunch of interesting, complex characters and put them all in some situation to see how they would interact with each other. Boogie Nights, The Watchmen, and to a lesser extent The Big Lebowski are all great examples of this type of storytelling, and so is Dexter. While on one level it fits the formula of detective fiction, it, like The Big Lebowski, also heavily revolves around the personal lives of its characters, which are all complicated in one way or another. A couple of my favorite characters are Angel Batista, an honest, kind detective whose good nature sometimes leads him to be taken advantage of by others, and lieutenant Maria LaGuerta, a political machine who craves media attention, but who is also shown to have a sensitive side at times. But my favorite character by far is sergeant James Doakes, a hardass, badass, no bullshit cop who is the only one that senses that Dexter is hiding something dark, since he has his own personal demons as well. As an added bonus, nearly every character on the show is absolutely gorgeous, and the cast is very diverse as well. We have white cops, black cops, Cuban cops, and one Asian American cop, all of whom have equally fucked up personal lives.

One criticism that I've heard about Dexter is that it's completely unrealistic. But who cares? It's TV. Every great show that I can think of (except for maybe The Wire) is completely unrealistic, and that's part of what makes them great. Despite the great writing and philosophical statements, that's all that Dexter really is: fucking great TV. It's full of witty one-liners and double entendres, ridiculously insane plot twists, and a cast of characters who are all sleeping with each other. But Dexter manages to be a little bit more than that as well. If you're in the mood for a great story with lots of great characters that sometimes manages to make you think about big ethical questions but always manages to entertain, then I'll be just one more person who tells everybody that they should watch Dexter.