This is a totally TV-criticism heavy Funny Strange, and if you don’t watch the show “Dexter” and you haven’t watched it, you’re going to probably want to skip this one. If that is the case I apologize in advance, and promise you future blogs on Charlie Sheen (who would rent him a hotel room? He’s like a wildebeest. Why does he even have a credit card?), the Quaids (hello—no one in Hollywood knows who you are anymore. You are not on a Hollywood hit list, you are just insane), and a picture I saw in People Magazine of Megan Fox and that guy from the old 90210 at a tiger sanctuary—hello– you are big dumb idiots and that tiger is going to bite you!) and much much more.
A note on why I like writing about TV: before I wrote novels and worked on the internet and did marketing, I actually went to school to be a theater reviewer/ critic/ college professor, got a whole Master’s degree and everything, wrote theater reviews for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and some other places, and even had some stuff published in a couple of books about theater. Ultimately I decided that this was not a direction I wanted to go for the rest of my life (mainly because I’m not confident in theater as an art form that’s still as relevant to the culture at large as it used to be, say during Shakespeare’s time), but with all that training, sometimes my mind goes to work on a TV show and I can’t let it go. So, with all those disclaimers….here is an analysis of why I think the show Dexter isn’t working anymore.
Dexter has totally been one of my favorite shows for the past four seasons, plus they have what is arguably the greatest title sequence since "Six Feet Under"– who knew breakfast food could be so sinister?? I never read the novel series, but I was fascinated by the flawed protagonist concept—it’s great writing to be able to make the audience identify (and even root for) a serial killer, right? In case you’re not with me on this, Dexter actually won a Peabody award and has won several Emmys, so let’s just agree that they did something right for the first four seasons.
Attention: season four finale spoiler (does it still count as a spoiler if it’s been ten months?)
Dexter’s wife is dead now. Surprise! You probably already know that Rita was murdered by Trinity, who was in turn murdered by Dexter (not a cause and effect scenario, more of a goulish coincidence). While Rita’s murder was shocking and horrible, didn’t you feel like the writers had been making her character so mean and pushy all season that you were kind of relieved that her character was done for? I sort of did.
Anyhoo, if you haven’t already noticed the change, last season the creator/ showrunner Clyde Phillips quit and the show got a new one— Chip Johannessen, who used to be the showrunner for 24. I know, this is one of those things you didn’t know, and you don’t really care about, but to me things like this are really important because sometimes (like in this case) they change the tone of the show. Chip Johannessen, I’m sorry, it’s clear he used to work on a network show, and even more clear that I (and other Dexter fans) know the world of that show better than he does, because now he’s taking the narrative in directions that it should not logically go, in addition to the fact that I can practically hear that “ching-ching-ching” of the seconds ticking off (a la 24), and the fact that Johannessen feels like he needs to hit us over the head with exposition in every segment because this is what he’s used to with 24 but which really, REALLY doesn’t work for this show because remember, Dexter is a serial killer so this show is all about the hunt. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this is going to be Johannessen’s only season with this show, and that they’re either going to beg Clyde Phillips to come back (even though he’s now working on another show), or switch to someone who actually watched and understood Dexter before, which Johannessen clearly didn’t.
So, here are some examples where I feel like Chip Johannessen is off the mark, and now I’ve got this show on probation, meaning if I see one more discrepancy like this, I’m going to stop watching because frankly, Johannessen has turned it into a different show that I’m not really that interested in. This is all conjecture of course, so I don’t really care if I am contradicted by “the best ratings ever!” (which, if this season does have that are probably just holdover viewers from that extremely well-done finale). These uninformed choices are just creating so many inconsistencies, now we’re even questioning things that had been established before, which is never good.
- Season premiere. I realize this is a lot of pressure for a new producer and that he made a tough choice by not advancing into the future (which would have been more of a chance to give himself a fresh start), but to have the episode open in the direct aftermath of the murder, then to even bring Rita’s kids back into the picture, just for the sake of showing Dexter’s detachment as a human being by having him break the news to them while wearing a Mickey Mouse hat? Cheap. If you even watched the show before you’ll remember that Rita’s last husband was a junkie who was in and out of prison, so it’s much more logical to extrapolate that the minute their mother gets murdered, those grandparents are never going to let them even go back to Miami, much less leave them in the hands of someone who isn’t even their father and who might have killed their mother. Just…no way. This just seemed like a ham-fisted way for Johannessen to demonstrate Dexter’s emotionally stunted personality, which by the way he had made progress on in the last season by getting married and connecting with the children, so it didn’t even work. Strike one.
- After killing Boyd (the sanitation guy), Dexter leaves the terrified girl that Boyd was holding prisoner (who saw him commit the murder) in the house? No no no NO! The actual first rule of the Code isn’t “Don’t get caught,” in my opinion—it’s “Don’t completely change your character because you got a new writer.” That girl (played by Julia Stiles in what we can only assume is going to be a season-long character arc in which she dies at the end because this is the guest star job previous fulfilled by Jimmy Smits, John Lithgow, and that woman with the weird mouth who played Lila) is terrified, starved, delirious, and is probably going to die of an infection— with those parameters, the next logical action is for Dexter to take her to an emergency room and dump her there, then if she ever comes back, he can be like “She was delirious and traumatized, are you going to take her word for it?” He’s done this many times before, so to have him make the choice to lock her back in the house, again, violates one of the rules of his character just to further the plot. Choices like this really bother me—now every subsequent action is based on this specious decision, so it gets us in deeper and deeper (like when he takes her out to that bog with all the barrels full of dead girls—another gaping plot hole—hello—are there no police in Miami anymore?), asking us to take a leap of faith when we now feel like something is just off and like Johannessen doesn’t know the characters or the story arcs well enough to make these decisions.
Also, if you’ll recall, Dexter’s discovery of this whole situation stemmed from the fact that he saw what he THOUGHT was a bloodstain in a U-Haul fan. Yes, yes, we understand—there has to be a starting point for this kill, since he’s on leave from the police station. I’m just saying there was a more creative way to handle this, and no one bothered to think of it. - Logistics that are now obvious, and are bugging me: Dexter now carries his kill kit with him? Wouldn’t that huge bolt of visquene plastic be really heavy? We have to watch him set the whole thing up now? Seems unnecessarily expository. While watching him set up for killing Boyd, I actually wondered out loud “Does he have to go to Kinko’s to print out those big portraits of the victims or does he print them out on a big laser printer in his apartment and them mount them on pieces of foam core with some spray adhesive like we did in set design class in college? Wouldn’t this set off any alarms?” This is how not in to the narrative I was, people.
So—now for your opinion. Are you watching? Are you believing this season? If you totally love the new direction, that would be very interesting to me. Let’s discuss.
