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Sunday, October 29, 2006

Brilliant@Pop Culture: Dumbfoundedly Dazzled by Dexter
Posted by Jill | 2:04 PM
It's not easy boycotting ABC this season. From Lost to Boston Legal to a number of the new shows, it's been hard to not just say, "Aw, fuck it" and watch, despite my utter revulsion at the decisions of ABC's entertainment division to run The Path to 9/11. But sometimes ideological purity has to hurt.

Fortunately, Showtime, which I'd boycotted after they ran the historically revisionist propaganda piece DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, redeemed themselves by running the Reagan miniseries out of which CBS had chickened out, so when Dish Network offered us Starz AND Showtime for fifteen bucks a month in perpetuity, I snapped it up, largely so that I could watch Dexter. And so, four weeks into the season, I've finally caught up with Dexter Morgan.

I don't think I've ever been as involved in a series as I was in Six Feet Under. Not even The Sopranos has felt so real and so organic; nor have its characters felt like people we know. That Alan Ball understood this and provided us with closure when the series ended hasn't stopped me from wishing that the Fishers could come visit us every now and then, much the way I wish that the departed in my own life could come visit every now and then. But perhaps the most organic Fisher of all was David, whose journey out of the closet and into parenthood provided the most compelling storyline in the entire series.

David Fisher was such a complex and memorable character that it's hard to imagine Michael C. Hall in any other role. But any ghosts of David Fisher were banished about eight minutes into the first episode of Dexter.

Dexter feels like one of those British crime dramas where the protagonist is so deeply flawed as to be interesting. For my money, the British Cracker was one of the best series ever shown on television. With drunken, loutish Fitz (Robbie Coltrane) at its center, Cracker built an entirely credible universe around its so-unlikeable-he's-likeable antihero, and held it together with fine supporting actors, directors like Michael Winterbottom, and tight, clever scripts.

If Dexter doesn't quite reach the literate heights of the British series to which it so obviously owes a debt, it's certainly not the fault of Michael C. Hall. As David Fisher, Hall exuded a kind of buttoned-up irony combined with a desperate need to be loved. As the serial killer who only dispatches those who deserve it, Hall is completely transformed. His blandly handsome choirboy face effortlessly moves from detachment to irony to dementedness without missing a beat. Painfully aware of his own nature and how it interferes with his ability to live a normal life, Hall's performance turns Dexter into a twisted version of a comic book superhero. He's the sick and twisted big brother to Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker.

Hall has a few excellent actors around him, and where these people are on the screen, the show is as good as anything the U.K. ever put out. Of particular note are Lauren Velez as police Lt. Maria LaGuerta, a woman clearly insecure in her position as boss of a largely male staff of police officers; and Julie Benz as Dexter's sort-of girlfriend Rita. Rita is as damaged as Dexter, though in a very different way, and Benz plays her with an interestingly ditzy vulnerability. The ease with which Dexter interacts with Rita's two young children seem to make him a kind of single mother dream guy, and while the sheer normality of the interaction might serve as a sledgehammer driving home the duality of Dexter's personality, they never play as forced.

Alas, the preposterous flashbacks, in which we learn how Dexter's adoptive father seeks to channel his son's homicidal nature in a positive, vigilante direction, play as if written by someone else, with huge hulking chunks of dialogue plopping off the screen and laying in a fetid heap on the floor. Part of the problem is that James Remar, last seen as Samantha's rich boss/boyfrined on Sex and the City, is a perfectly ghastly actor, but he's given clunky lines to deliver. Under the best of circumstances, you would have to suspend huge amounts of disbelief when confronted with a by-the-books cop who enables homicidal behavior in his son, whatever kind of twisted moral code lies behind it. But in Dexter, these scenes seem to have walked in by mistake from another series entirely.

For those of us who don't really unwind from the workweek to the point of being ready for a weekend until Sunday night, and as a result have trouble sleeping, unsettling series like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos haven't helped matters any. Dexter fills that weirdness gap very nicely, thank you very much.
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