Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the Showtime Show Dexter

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

You know when the first date goes well and you see a spark, an original relationship that just feels… right. Then you hang on and hang on for dear life, hoping to for the return of that original spark that made the whole thing feel so good, but as the seasons roll on you feel like you have both… drifted? And then after years, the breakup is so inevitable, as you are left wondering just whether or not you ought to have made the mistake of leaving things FAR too late and you ought to have ended the damn thing SO much earlier?

But why did you hang on…

Welcome to Dexter.

Originally based on Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, it bounded onto our consciences with a storming first series. The principal idea was mind blowing. Instead of having a detective team muddle through various cases that involve a serial killer, why don’t we just follow the serial killer? Oh, and add in that he works for the police, give him a complex backstory with his sister who will eventually investigate his crimes, some decent and diverse casting and make his serial killing a complex virtuoso performance which includes him, taking out the badder guys…
Ooooh how delicious, now I remember why I held on – I was all of a muddle!

And I did hold on. Right to the end.

With Dexter played by Michael C Hall it was hard not to. He brought an immense naivete and intensity to Dexter who had flashbacks with surrogate father Harry, who brought him up, instructing him in a code to which he adhered and seemed to suggest an inherited serial killing gene. As the seasons unfolded, we discovered that Dexter had witnessed the death of his mother in a brutal killing – that seemed to explain his blood fascination. He was then adopted by police officer, Harry Morgan – that explained the flashbacks – who recognized his new charge had tendencies towards the macabre and honed them into a code where he just went after the guys who escaped justice – and that explained his mission in life.

Dexter walked a fine line between the killer and the solver, ably supported by a team at Miami Dade, where Debra, his adopted sister, played by Jennifer Carpenter, Lieutenant/ Captain Maria LaGuerta played by Lauren Valdez, Detective Sergeant/Lieutenant Angel Batista played by David Zayas and C. S. Lee played by Vince Masuka are the supporting characters who made the entire series sing. James Remar put in a fine performance as the haunting presence of Harry Morgan, whilst there were some highly significant storylines that centered around characters including the troubled sergeant James Dokes played by Erik King in the first two seasons. Then there was Rita. Rita was Dexter’s girlfriend, eventual wife and played by Julie Benz, who was murdered in Dexter’s competition with another serial killer – the Trilogy killer….

We also saw Keith Carradine, Jimmy Smits and Johnny Lee Miller make appearances which marked out the strength and the success of the series.

Over 8 series and 96 episodes I, along with a host of others, truly bought into this unique take on the genre.

The premise was not simple. Dexter is a Miami Metro blood technician working crime scenes. The first season was steeped in the origin novel and was all about The Ice Truck Killer. It was, if you pardon the expression, a killer beginning. From that first season the TV series was developed independently from the book. I found the flaccid second season flaccid though it involved a British actress, Jaime Murray, who had moved from Hustle on the BBC, in which she was very well suited, to take part in the series: it did not quite hit the same heights as the Ice Truck mystery. She played a rather disturbed British artist, Lila Tourney, who became obsessed with Dexter in a way that we as an audience perhaps had done. Rather than feel we had someone on the show to mimic our own thinking, her character became an intrusive irritation.

I could forgive the failure of meeting our expectations in a second season, and it had the advantage of running when there was a writer’s strike in 2007/08 which led to the first four seasons being given a great deal of praise, but it was waning in the ratings.

It had included a master stroke in competing serial killers when they had John Lithgow – who does not like anything with John Lithgow in it – as Arthur Mitchell, the Trilogy Killer. With a name so anonymous you would never consider him to have a murderous bone in his body we were fooled into thinking that Dexter had met his match. Their battle was a return to the type of form we had expected at the start, and we were once more captured.

Culturally though with a massive slew of awards, spin offs and the inevitability that true life murderers would try and attach them to the crimes of Dexter to justify their own, it was a juggernaut culturally. It changed the face of crime television. There has not been quite the same event from other networks or creatives as anything that would match this genre would need to do that – match it. With a slew of awards and popularity that was off the scale, the standard seems just a bit away from those in the creative industries, just yet.

By season eight the writing was not only in the script but on the wall as Dexter was running out of form. And then came THAT finale. He walks off into the snow set…

It was not the heights of the Tooth Fairy Killer or the Trinity Killer but a damp squib of an event. Of course, now it has been revived… I am away to have another look to reacquaint myself with serial killing from a unique angle…

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…