Dexter Morgan is power-boating down Biscayne Bay, waving to the other weekend sailors and indulging his habit of interior monologuing. “People fake a lot of human interactions,” he tells us, “but I feel like I fake them all, and I fake them very well.” Dexter Morgan is a serial killer thriving amid Miami’s 25 per cent homicide conviction rate, but there are two unusual things that you should be aware of: he works for the Miami police department and he is the hero, rather than anything else, of Dexter, the latest American import that the digital channel FX has had the wit to bring to our Sunday nights.
Pilots can be sticky – too many introductions, too much exposition – but last night’s was pure pleasure, 50 minutes that took us not only to the heart of the hunt for a serial killer (another serial killer) and, if only he had one, to Dexter’s heart, too. Flashbacks illuminated disturbing scenes from his childhood in which his foster father, a local cop, noticed that his son was a killer and gently suggested that his “good kid” train his psychopathy in socially useful directions and kill only those monsters who escape police justice. Like his wife, Harry Morgan is dead now but – and for what a sociopath’s word is worth – Dexter promises he didn’t kill him.
In his soliloquies, Dexter is a Martian reporting his findings about the human race. Every night in Miami is date night. He finds that weird given how undignified he finds intercourse but knows he must blend in and so has found a girlfriend as squeamish about the exchange of intimate fluid as he is.
He is puzzled, too, by his popularity. His sister Debra, another cop, goes so far as to love him. Her superior, Lt Maria LaGuerta, has the hots for him and he buys the high opinion of the rest of the force with doughnuts. Only savvy Sgt Doakes finds him out-and-out creepy, a psychological hit-rate among the department that may explain its poor detection levels.
The trick that the actor Michael C. Hall, as Dexter, must pull off is to creep us out, too, yet retain a portion of our sympathies. Hall, who was wonderful as the gay yet oh-so-straight brother in Six Feet Under, brings all his gifts to the exercise, never asking us to connive in the black humour that Hannibal Lecter made de rigueur for serial killers.
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Had he reprised his David Fisher role here he would have freaked us out not won us over; in this stylish, sideburned, Florida-casual incarnation he is almost cool, cool enough certainly to fit into the overlit, overdesigned version of Miami painted here.
When in his job as “blood-spatter” expert, he reconstructs killings using lengths of thin red string, he produces meticulously constructed installations that would grace the White Cube gallery. But the fascinating thing about Dexter is that he is a paradox – a psycho with a moral conscience – that even he cannot work out. Dexter can shock us but he surprises himself, too, as when he notices his excitement about a killer who drains victims of their blood before chopping them into parcels. It is the affinity, of course, of one bloodless creature with another.
Dexter, which derives from a 2004 novel called Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, shows how interesting American TV can be when it dares. CSI: NY (Five) reminded us on Saturday how desperate it can be when it doesn’t.
This spin-off of a spin-off is much nastier than Dexter because it grants murder victims no respect at all. This week a man was impaled in a nightclub on a condom machine. “So much for safe sex,” glibbed one of Detective Mac Taylor’s team of sentimental cynics. To liven things up, the former tennis player and BBC commentator John McEnroe played himself as the murder suspect.
Incredibly, his wooden cameos were far from the worst things about the episode. For those, try dialogue containing lines such as: “So the question is how was John McEnroe in two places at once” and “Unless . . . what if there’s more than one John McEnroe?” When the CSI franchise began it offered a new take on crime by examining it through the microscope of forensic science. Now it’s just for morons.
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Out of the box
- I was full of praise last week for the latest instalment of The Thick of It, repeated over the weekend on BBC Four. I take none of it back, but one of my regular correspondents, Joe Jones, was surprised that I was impressed by the ousted adviser Glen’s despairing line “I am feeling as up to date as the Gregorian calendar.” The Gregorian calendar, he points out, is the one we use now. But would Julian have sounded as funny?
- The latest gang to join Facebook? The Feral Beasts of the Media Group, who take their name from Tony Blair’s jibe. Broadcast magazine reports that among its 926 members, hunting “in packs” to “tear reputations to bits”, is Peter Horrocks, head of BBC TV news.