One of the greatest things about not having cable is that I don't watch something unless I actively seek it out. The thing is, I love television as a medium. It's a way to tell stories that span far longer than film, and can have some great character development. A movie is like a short story, but each TV episode is a chapter, and a season can end up being a novel. (I've long maintained that the type of story I saw Star Wars Episode III being would have been better told through a TV series.) When done right, it can be fantastic.
Sad, then, that it is so rarely done right.
But Dexter, that's a show that's done right. I recently watched the first two seasons. I could talk about a lot that I like about it, but what really stands out to me is the character development. It's really fantastic. A lot of that, surprisingly, comes from the title character's voiceovers. I say "surprisingly" because voiceovers so rarely work well, but they do here.
Between that and everything else, the viewer ends up really caring about a serial killer, often being torn between letting him get away with what he's doing and the price that would impose on those around him. We can sympathize with him, while recognizing his hypocrisy and self-delusion. In a way, I think he's sort of all of us to the extreme: we all do things that aren't entirely on the up and up, though they fall far short of murder most of the time. But we convince ourselves that we're still good people in spite of the bad things we do. In a way, that's what Dexter does (though he doesn't claim to be a good person). In that way, we see ourselves in him. And that builds the connection.
I highly recommend the series, but it's not for those who are unable to view fake blood and gore. It's a serial killer show--what do you expect?
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