Showtime’s “Dexter” Gives Michael C. Hall a New Spotlight

As David Fisher on HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” Michael C. Hall was easily the most likeable of the family of undertakers. The role made him something of a star, and the question for every actor with a series ending is “what’s next?” Showtime’s “Dexter” offers Mr. Hall a chance to answer that, in a very unsettling way.

As Frazier Moore of the Associated Press put it, Dexter “enjoys his job as a blood-spatter expert with the Miami Police Department. His foster sister, a Miami cop, looks to him for support in her own career. He has a girlfriend who, conveniently, is too traumatized from her abusive ex-husband to be interested in sex. (The last thing Dexter wants is intimacy.) He has a cabin cruiser and a home by the water. And a passion: He’s a serial killer. Dexter stalks and executes only the deserving. He is a self-styled safety net who catches, then eliminates, bad people the cops and courts have let slip through the cracks: ‘The ones,’ he sums up, ‘that think they beat the system’.” Again, he’s in a series that isn’t “The Waltons.”

Showtime has been playing a poor second to HBO’s stable of original programs in the last few years. “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “Sex and the City” were just better than “Dead Like Me,” and “Weeds.” With “Dexter,” the people at Showtime have raised their game, and although only one episode has aired, this could be the start of something big.

The series will hinge on two factors: the writing and Mr. Hall. The potential for exploration into the more twisted parts of humanity, and that is up to the writers. If the “joke” of a serial killer murdering serial killers doesn’t stay fresh, it’s just another slasher show. TV and movies have relied on that instead of real tension and suspense for too long as it is.

Then, there the acting challenge. “The thing that scared me and excited me the most about playing him,” Hall told the AP, “is his insistence that he’s without authentic human emotions. How do you inhabit a character like that?” That’s a good question, and one awaits the answer with some confidence that Mr. Hall can show how.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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