Dexter

This may be giving away my opinion too soon, but I looked at all the shows on my list of reviews to open with, all the ones I keep watching, and except for those I'll be reviewing today, I liked all of them enough to watch them voluntarily. This would be pretty boring, and I might as well change the name to "Shows Cooper Likes."

So, the special today is, "Shows Cooper Doesn't Like."

If you stay tuned, there may be a free gift basket in for you (spoilers: There isn't.)

When reviewing Dexter, it's important to take note that I have only started the latest season, and not finished it.

Dexter was like a new relationship.

Seasons 1-2: The first date. It's great. He's charming, and funny, and seems to like strip clubs too much, but that's okay, because he's smart, and you've never met anything like him before.
Seasons 3-4: You're just not feeling it anymore. The sex is lackluster, the romance is gone. He no longer lights candles for you when you come home. You stay because you hope he still has a few surprises left in him, that he's still the man you knew.
Season 5: He's started seeing another woman behind your back. He tries to make it up to you, but it's just not the same.
Season 6: Now he's found religion. He leaves you behind, with only a few cryptic biblical clues, and the pictures of his former self.

The extended metaphor is done, I promise.

Dexter is a show on Showtime, a premium cable channel. They are allowed to be pretty graphic, which explains why there was constant nudity in the first few seasons--this was given way to less sexual nudity in the fourth season, and pretty much abandoned entirely by the fifth--and why there's more swearing than in an average high school cafeteria. (It's cool, yo.)

It's a very interesting, and to the 'save our children' crowd, controversial concept. Dexter is a serial killer, who exclusively goes after serial killers. His foster father discovers Dexter's budding sociopathy, and rather than attempt literally anything else, decides to use Dexter as a weapon, encouraging him, and training him to get away with, going after those the system couldn't catch, thanks to all that pesky red tape.

This has elements of the typical crime procedural, down to each character (including Dexter) working in the Miami Metro Police Department. I do admit, the first two seasons worked out extremely well.

Season one is a season-long character analysis of, who else, Dexter. We learn why he does what he does, what drives him to kill. We learn about the important people in his life, but they are nothing but basic caricatures (a phenomenon I'll discuss more in-depth later in shows like Daria, who employed this tactic entirely on purpose) to prop up the main character.

In season 2, another good character arises. The foil to Dexter, Doakes. I feel this season had a great idea--Dexter's crimes being uncovered, and him alternately trying to feed his need to kill and throw the police off his trail--but it was a trump card played too soon.

In my ideal world, this would have been season 4, with each season previous taking a point to characterize everyone else beyond: "foul-mouthed-tom-boy-awkward-machine," "alcoholic-man-married-to-job," and simply "backstabbing-bitch." With everyone else having been fleshed out, grounding the show deep in the gray, it would have been even more tense to see the Bay Harbor Butcher try to outfox people we've grown to care about.

But wait, I hear from my metaphorical audience of 5. Isn't Dexter already a pretty gray show, on the morality scale?

I would say that it operates more on a Blue and Orange morality scale. Dexter is a man doing bad things to bad people, because of a good man's frustration that bad people get away because good people have to have lines. So the good man finds a man who does not have those lines, and gets him to clean up the messes good people can't touch. It could be viewed as an eye-for-an-eye, the show postulates. Deeply aware of irony, Dexter kills each killer in a clean chamber filled only with two killers, and their victims. (The room he sterilizes for the killing usually has great importance to the killer, as well as whatever tokens Dexter can drag up from their murders.)

It starts off decently gray, but as the show goes along, it loses that sense of irony. It loses the sense that we are rooting for the bad guy, because the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Dexter takes fledgling serial killers under his wing--done for one episode early on, but quickly dropped--for season-long arcs (see season 2 and season 5).

When it started portraying Dexter as the good guy, it tries to balance this out by having the serial killers make this more personal, like the end of season 4's death, or the entirety of season 6.

Meanwhile, Deb, Dexter's adopted sister, devolves into Awkward Machine. The show tries to be aware of this, then gives up and just demands you accept it when her sexual prospects get slowly more awkward, then she's handed a Freudian Excuse, and then, not kidding, she falls in love with Dexter. No excuse, no nudge with a knowing grin. Straight-faced, she falls in love with him.

Can I call Jumping the Shark yet, or does it count if the show was initially in Kansas, moved closer to Florida (home of crazy), ordered the shark, lit a hoop on fire and attached it to the shark, then jumped it? Repeatedly?