Deft, Dark Dexter

If you haven’t yet watched Michael C. Hall’s new dark comedy series, Dexter, on Showtime, WATCH MICHAEL C. HALL’S NEW DARK COMEDY SERIES, DEXTER ON SHOWTIME!! Sunday nights at 10 PM. The pilot will be rerunning tonight at 10 PM and 12:30 AM. So you can be all caught up for the second episode on Sunday night. Michael C. Hall is absolutely brilliant as a blood-splatter analyst for the Miami PD, who also happens to be a serial killer. He’s a sociopath, in whom his foster father instilled a code at a young age, and therefore he only kills murderers and rapists who slipped through the cracks. MCH makes him a funny and creepy anti-hero. The ingenious thing about his performance is that, in his interactions with everyday people, he seems engaging and friendly, yet if you look carefully at his face, you can always see him, for a brief second, thinking out what he is going to say before he says it, trying to best approximate an average human being. In a way, it’s a more subtle version of any sci-fi story where an alien takes over a human body and tries to learn its rhythms. Because Dexter is a monster, who although he may look and seem to act like a human, does not understand how other humans think. A great deal of dark comedy is derived from his trying to figure out the human race and their habits. Also, Julie Benz gives a wonderful performance, as his damaged girlfriend, a beard of sorts who helps him maintain his cover but for whom he has no sexual attraction, as he hasn’t for any person. I think this is going to be a fantastic series. A fantastic twist on the noir genre.