Dexter Dismembers Your Television

Dexter seems nice enough. He's got a nice job (working for the Miami police department), a nice girlfriend (Rita, a fragile single mom who smiles a lot), a nice apartment, a nice life.

But it's all just a nice, convenient cover for his not-so-nice hobby—killing people, dismembering their bodies and dumping them in an out-of-the-way harbor. He's a serial killer, driven by a hunger he can't understand and a lust for blood that he refuses to deny. He craves the hunt and keeps trophies from his victims—daubs of blood, plucked from wounds on their cheeks moments before Dexter kills, carves and guts them.

Not the sort of guy you'd invite over for dinner. Or is he? Does it matter that Dexter apparently can't help himself? Does it matter that he only kills other killers? Is Dexter's messy pastime mitigated by the fact that he brings doughnuts to work?

Those are the questions Showtime's—and now, CBS'—Dexter asks every episode.

Just a Regular Guy?
From the first minute of the first episode, viewers are drawn into Dexter's twisted world. He talks to us—tells us what he's thinking, what he's feeling. His flashbacks give us glimpses of how he came to be. When he admits to being a monster, we agree. And yet many viewers root for him all the same. His sense of isolation, unhealthy urges and longing for unconditional love can feel all too familiar—even though our urges most likely don't involve hacking people up like Thanksgiving turkeys.

And so we become unwitting, voyeuristic accomplices.

"Some people express a sense of guilt that they are drawn to the show," Dexter star Michael C. Hall told USA Today. "Maybe the guilt is more intense because they find themselves identifying with and liking the guy."

Dexter wasn't born with these urges to kill. He lost what he'd call his humanity as a 3-year-old child, when he witnessed an unspeakable crime. When Dexter starts killing animals, his adopted dad figures Dex's urge to kill will only grow stronger. So he begins to train his son to use these urges for "good"—to kill those killers who escape the law and prey on the truly innocent.

"You can't help what happened to you," he tells Dex. "But you can make the best of it."

And so his father shapes Dexter into a dark, avenging angel—a 21st century Robin Hood armed with a power drill and meat cleaver. Dexter kills only those who (in his eyes) deserve it, euphemistically calling his hobby "taking out the garbage." And in Dexter's atheistic world, it's an ethos that makes sense. If God's not around to punish the dregs of humanity, someone's gotta do it, right?

But Enough Rationalization
Alas, Dexter—as creepily likeable as he may be—has to be classified as, down deep, such a dreg. Even if killing of on-the-loose bad guys were OK (it's not), Dexter kills to salve his own hunger for blood. The fact that such killings are, in a sense, "just," is just a fringe benefit—something to assuage his own guilt, and the audience's. Don't most bad guys excuse their misdeeds as justified? Wouldn't titans of the trade like Hitler and Stalin have said much the same thing? Dexter is not only playing God by judging his prey, but he shapes the rules by which they're guilty.

Which leaves Dexter playing the part of a gussied-up Saw movie made for TV. Granted, Dexter doesn't use blood with quite the same grotesque titillation that Saw and other torture-porn movies do. But it's there—in buckets. We see brutal killings, dismembered bodies and blood pools aplenty. We see and hear all about Dexter's admiration for another killer's handiwork. And, though the show sometimes makes a halfhearted attempt to humanize the victims ("Take a man's life, you're not just killing him," Dexter's dad tells him in flashback, "you're snuffing out all the things he'll become"), they largely are shown, both literally and literarily, as gray slabs of meat.

There's more to be on guard against in Dexter, too. Profanity is pervasive. Sex makes an occasional appearance: In the Showtime pilot, audiences get a glimpse of a torture porn Web site. A few episodes later, Dexter's girlfriend apparently performs oral sex on him. (We see the back of her head.)

New Audience, Same Problems
Some of Dexter's surface content has been trimmed for the CBS version of the series. The worst curse words are absent (though viewers still hear "b--ch," "b--tard" and "d--n"), and the most graphic sexual elements have been axed.

But nearly all the blood, gore and terror remain. And, of course, CBS can't—nor does it want to—do a thing about Dexter's problematic ethos. And that's far more worrisome than a garbage bag full of f-words.

"What could possibly lead [CBS] to determine that a show about a pathological serial killer 'hero' could be appropriate for 14-year-old children?" asked Parents Television Council president Tim Winter, while urging advertisers to take their money elsewhere and, thus, expunge the TV-14-rated series from network TV. "When each new day brings a headline news story about yet another senseless mass murder in America, how could CBS make such an irresponsible programming decision? Whether it is a school shooting, a shopping mall murder, a slaughter at a city council meeting or a family execution, the epidemic of violence continues unabated. The broadcast industry must grasp the significance of the role it plays by desensitizing and validating violent and unlawful behavior."

"People think it's fun to pretend you're a monster," Dexter tells us. "Me, I spend my life pretending I'm not."

Indeed. Dexter pretends a lot. He smiles. He plays with his girlfriends' kids. He only kills bad guys. But don't let the smile take your attention away from the meat cleaver and power drill he holds. When it comes right down to it, Dexter's not nice at all.