Showtime’s Dexter, which just finished its second season, is up for a WGA award this year. Like most high-profile cable dramas that have appeared in the wake of The Sopranos, it balances upper middlebrow dramatic concerns—quirky characters, complex narrative lines, psychological questioning—with visceral, often vulgar elements. But the competing interests of these two strains has forced it into a series of ungainly, and sometimes ugly, moral contortions.
The show, which follows the exploits of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a Miami PD blood-spatter analyst who also happens to be a serial killer—albeit one who only targets other murderers—is high concept in the extreme, a cockeyed mash-up of American Psycho, Miami Vice, and CSI. Dexter, we learn, is a bona fide murderous sociopath—lacking a conscience and unable to experience normal emotions—but he lives by a code imparted to him as a boy by his adoptive father.
The code allows Dexter to control his bloody urges by killing those who “deserve it,” and requires him to blend in with society in order not to get caught. So he maintains a polite, even conciliatory persona, and has a perky girlfriend, a respectable job, and a sister for whom he has assumed responsibility. Meanwhile, Dexter, in voice-over, muses on his own humanity (or lack thereof) as a creature with no more moral compass than a rock.
The problem, though, is that, as a cable-TV protagonist, Dexter must not be wholly unsympathetic. Often, one gets the sense that the show’s writers are simply engaged in a game to see how disreputable they can make him and still have an audience follow him. How many times can you watch someone dismember another human—even if they’re only criminals—before he becomes too disgusting to watch? The show tries for balance by having Dexter perform acts of seeming goodness (playing with his girlfriend’s kids, helping out his sister), but then quickly reminds us that he only does these things to keep up the façade.
The show clearly recognizes its quagmire, and even plays to it, putting Dexter in all sorts of situations that ought to expose him, once and for all, as either a true moral void or someone of at least limited conscience. But every time it does, it opens up a way for him to escape these situations without having to make a defining choice. It’s a series of dodges, and eventually it becomes fairly tiresome.
More than that, it borders on cowardly. The writers want to have it both ways: the, sick, voyeuristic, and attention-grabbing thrills of following a serial killer and the moral bedrock afforded by a traditional protagonist. The show’s fatal flaw is that, lacking the strength either to celebrate its title character’s amorality or to condemn him for it, Dexter hopes to pass off the refusal as praise-worthy ambiguity.
