I don’t know why I started watching Dexter, but I did, and now I’m done. Thanks to streaming, I squished eight years of prestige television into exactly two months. It’s always a bit strange to watch something for the first time at a greater advantage than the pioneers who watched it first. I watched Season 1 in twelve days, scaled Season 4 in a weekend. Instead of hanging from a cliff for a year, I hopped from one season into another with no effort or strain. And then it was done, finished. Dexter became a show I had watched in next to no time.
Another eight year-long thing that I squished into two months was my PhD. My PhD, which I began in 2015 and ended in 2023, but not without writing my fourth chapter and introduction and epilogue and revising the whole dissertation (4 chapters + intro + epilogue + abstract, totaling more than 200 pages) in the last four months before the deadline I had chosen. My PhD was long and grueling but no more so than in those last two months, when I found myself wrangling nearly a decade’s worth of theses, ideas, digressions, loose threads, and all tiny experiments into a coherent single entity. Interestingly, I started watching Dexter after I handed in a copy for my examiners to read.
Dexter is a show about a serial killer, a brilliant serial killer who only kills bad people, and therefore helps society. It’s based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay and was developed for TV by James Manos Jr. Television shows like Dexter endlessly present “the serial killer” as a kind of mastermind (from its moral antihero to the countless evil psychopaths he hunts), when in reality, this is not the case. It makes for compelling entertainment though, somehow, if a little brutal. I don’t normally watch shows where regular cast members and episode-by-episode newcomers might die sudden, violent deaths. For example, I stopped Game of Thrones after the Red Wedding and never felt compelled to return to it again. I wonder if I sensed that, after two months of fervently reworking my dissertation, I had become so numb that I would be able to watch Dexter. Perhaps I sensed there was a brief window that might allow me to consume it.
And so I consumed it. And then, standing at the end, I was not sure what to make of it. I think it’s difficult to regard it as a comprehensive entity, when its eight parts differ vastly in quality. The first half of the series, the first four seasons, are very solid; together, they carry the show in a clear direction, like pallbearers going up into a church. As to the second half of the series… many friends told me to “stop watching” after Season 4. Another friend told me to hold on for an incredible performance from Julia Stiles in Season 5. The online consensus seems to be that Season 8 is the worst of them all, with its forced loose-end-tying. Personally, I found Season 6, featuring a pair of sadistic, religiously-motivated killers DIYing various Biblical horrors, to be nearly unbearable, the kind of syndicated torture porn that comes from a desperate attempt to raise stakes.
People told me I might feel depressed after finishing my PhD, but I didn’t. I thought I would, honestly. I felt depressed after passing my qualifying exams, halfway during the process—burned out and existential, wondering what all this academic hoopla was for. But I was not depressed when I finished the PhD. Which is good. In part because I don’t think I could watch Dexter, with all its meaningless death, if I didn’t feel so happy. Dexter‘s the kind of show that ruins its characters’ lives as an alternative to killing them.
In case you don’t know what it’s about, here: it’s about a psychopath named Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), who works as a blood spatter analysis for the Miami Metro Police Department. He has had urges to kill for his whole waking life, but growing up, his adoptive father, a police detective named Harry (James Remar), had, in an attempt to keep him out of jail and prevent him from killing innocent people, taught him a code: he could kill, as long as he killed people he had confirmed were guilty of terrible, harmful crimes. As an adult, Dexter hunts and kills all manner of violent reprobates: the remorseless, the greedy, the malevolent. He kills murder-happy child molesters, torturers, rapists, human traffickers, gangsters, other serial killers, you name it. He does most of this in Miami, but occasionally he branches out geographically. He takes home little trophies—microscope slides with dots of their blood on them—to remind himself of what he’s done.
The fact that both he and his sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter) work for the city police, as well as that no one else knows about his secret life, causes problems. Especially because the more he pretends to have a normal life, the more he finds he wants one. Obviously, this also causes problems. A lot of them. Eight seasons’ worth. Plus, there’s a reboot—a limited series taking place in the present day, a decade or so after the events of the series concluded. I haven’t watched that one yet. I don’t know if I will.
But it did make me wonder, as many things often do, what is precisely so appealing about “the serial killer” as a character, so much so that Dexter offered “a good one”? Indeed, Dexter is rather genius for its getting to both have its cake and eat it: it features the serial killer figure that viewers seem to find so compelling, and erases most of the guilt around enjoying the narratives spawned by such a figure.
More than that, though, Dexter offers appeal on an existential, a philosophical level. It is a Pinocchio story, sometimes a little like Peter Pan. It is the story about someone on the outskirts of the social contract, someone who understands that he’s different than others, and wonders if he’ll ever get to experience humanity the way everyone else does, dwells on his missing parts and how the most he can do to feel like others is to watch them and imitate what they do. It’s also a story about gender identification and performance; it is the story of a man who cobbles together an aesthetic of masculinity from studying signifiers. Emily Nussbaum, writing about Dexter in Vulture in 2010, said “Dexter Morgan believes he’s a sociopath, but just as often, he behaves like a hypermasculine male out of a sociobiological cartoon. His aggressive impulses are a monster repressed beneath a civilized face. He has fetishistic fantasies he fears outsiders will find disgusting. And while he wants relationships, both as a cover for his crimes and in order to feel more human (two desires he has trouble distinguishing), he also feels trapped by the muck of human intimacy.”
In these ways, Dexter is much more a story about living than killing, and it’s far more universal than a story about a serial killer; it’s about the anxieties of “passing” as one’s own ideal while also being afraid of one’s own desires, compulsions, and inabilities. Through Dexter‘s preoccupations with themes of alienation and isolation and self-denial, it becomes a resonant story about what it means to be a person in a society. Reviewing the series in 2007, Gina Bellafante noted “Dexter finds both its murk and its muscle in explorations of intimacy rather than aberration. Can we be loved once we are really known? Are we to form our closest attachments with those who see and accept the darkest aspects of our nature or the people who prop us up to dull but honorable displays of decency?”
If there is a second governing principle to Dexter, it’s about familial bonds. Bellafante has said, “Dexter is, at heart, a relationship drama, obsessed with the notions of what constitutes family and where our loyalties should ultimately lie,” but I’d go further and nudge Dexter’s genre a bit more towards domestic melodrama, a grislier, bloodier version of the sort of tale we’d get from Douglas Sirk. Melodrama, as Peter Brooks described in his groundbreaking study The Melodramatic Imagination in 1976, argues that the genre developed in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe as a way to fill a kind of cultural void, after the decades-long shocks of the French Revolution; “traditional imperatives of truth and ethics had been violently questioned and yet… [there was] still a need for truth and ethics.” The sheer dramatic excess and often extreme themes inherent in melodrama offered pathways for viewers to begin to reset their internalizations about questions of good and evil.
Brooks’ definition of melodrama (on the 18th and 19th century stage, mind you) can only take us so far into Dexter; crucially, Brooks argues that in melodrama of this era, characters lack “interior depth.” Brooks says that “melodrama exteriorizes conflict and psychic structure,” rather than portray characters who have complex psychologies. And Dexter is rather the opposite of this. But Dexter is stylized as a melodrama anyway, representing the extremes of human experience in ordinary, domestic, everyday spaces, placing entities like “the family” or “the spouses” on the same altar as enormous questions of morality, taking its abstract themes to extremely literal, externalized places.
This is what is so interesting about Dexter: its ability to weave together extremes. Constantly, it navigates between the profound and the grotesque, even the highbrow and the lowbrow, knitting them all together into a bloody spectacle of human potential. It drags its characters to their limits, on different planes of being, and calls it a day’s work.
