Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Dexter: “Dexter” and “Crocodile”

When I first watched these episodes, I thought the producers of the Showtime cable series Dexter had a thing for the color green, either because it represented the tropical atmosphere of Miami (the city where the events of Dexter take place) or the ghoulishness of the show's protagonist, Dexter Morgan, who is a self-confessed “lab rat” and blood splatter analyst for the Miami police department. The faces of almost every other character would turn green every so often and even the most austere of backgrounds would come across as slightly olive.

Then I realized that there was something wrong with my TV set. I have since corrected the problem, but for a while there, I thought the producers of Dexter were being more visually creative than I expected.

Not that the show itself was all that boring. If you have read Jeff Lindsay's Darkly Dreaming Dexter (like I have), you can probably guess where the plot was leading. But apart from that, the show wasn't too predictable. And actor Michael C. Hall of Six Feet Under, who played the title character, did a good job of making a rather unbelievable character (a police department “lab rat” who “moonlighted” as a “justice”-seeking serial killer) seem believable.

Even more interesting was the attention paid to the show's supporting characters. True, there did seem to be an anti-affirmative-action subtext in the way the show presented a black police sergeant (Doakes) and a Hispanic police lieutenant (Laguerta) as Dexter's two main antagonists in the Miami police department. (Actually, Laguerta was more an antagonist of Dexter's foster sister, who also worked for the Miami police department, but she might as well have been Dexter's antagonist.) However, both Doakes and Laguerta had scenes which made them seem more sympathetic than their counterparts in the original novel and Laguerta especially had an interesting scene in the second episode which seemed to imply that the reason Laguerta was being so hard on Dexter's foster sister was Laguerta's resentment of the Anglo (white non-Hispanic) superiors who showed an open friendliness to Dexter's foster sister that they never quite showed to her.

Moreover, it's hard to complain about ethnic stereotypes too much in a show that (1) paid more attention to Hispanic characters than most cable shows I've seen since Six Feet Under; (2) featured a scene in which two Hispanic characters speak in Spanish without having their words translated or subtitled for the benefit of Anglo TV watchers; (3) featured more Anglo evildoers than Hispanic evildoers; and (4) had an Anglo protagonist who is a serial killer.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this show develops. I wasn't quite happy with the way Lindsay developed the character of Dexter Morgan in his novel (there's something at best questionable about the whole concept of a “heroic” serial killer), but I think it will be intriguing to see if the TV show follows a different route. At least it won't be dull.