Hello, dear friends. Nice to have you back for the third part of my best-tv-shows-ever review!
Todays show is just about the limit and, to be honest, nothing for weak nerves and stomaches! I am talking about Dexter!
The show is named after its main charakter, Dexter Morgan, a charismatic Forensic of the Miami Police Department. Dexters area of expertise is the analysis of blood spatter patterns. He can reconstruct the course of events of a crime by looking at the blood left behind at a crime scene.
His brilliance in this job isn't just based on his precise working mind, no, Dexter has a secret ... He is living a double life, on the day he is a cop, in the night a serial killer.
All this sounds really crazy, but the show is made very clever and believable. Dexter was raised as the adoptive son of a cop. Soon it was clear, that Dexter wasn't like a normal boy. He doesn't have any kind of emotions and the urge to kill is rising in him. His dad realizes there is nothing he can do to "cure" his son. But instead of getting professional help, he tries to parent Dexter on his own. He teaches his son how to pretend to be normal, how to kill without being punished and whom to kill.
Dexters victims are always criminals (or people who Dexter thinks are criminals) who did not get their punishment by the law. For example a rapist who came free due to procedural errors would be on the top of Dexters list. How Dexter works off this list is shown in extreme graphic detail.
The special thing about this show is, that Dexter becomes the "good guy" for the viewer. You really hope that he succeeds in murdering those scumbags and that his colleagues and family (his little sister works at the police department, too) don't catch him. But on the otherside you know it is wrong what he does and that you should detest him. It's an interesting moral dilemma.
Visually it once again is a great show. Miami as a setting is already known from some other shows but still has a great flair to it and can fascinate the viewer. You also have to say, that the creators of Dexter really know how to show realistic looking wounds of every sort (especially the disgusting ones) ;)
Through season 1 you get to know Dexter and how he became what he is today. After about half of the season Dexters past begins to haunt him which culmulates in a fulminant season final. The individual episodes have their own stories, but there also is "the big story" which connects all the episodes. The Lost-Addiction-Factor is definitely there.
Since the end of September 2007 episode two of Dexter is aired in the USA. In Germany we have to wait till at least 2008 for the first season. As stated on Serienjunkies.de RTL2 has picked up Dexter. We will have two see how cut it is, I can't imagine the show to come out uncensored on free-TV in Germany ...
Tags: dexter · review · series · tv