But...I accidentally caught the first episode of season 4 on FX HD the other night....why on earth did the producers decide to 'humanise' the character to such an extent that he now is married and has a baby?!
That totally guts the menacing dark nature of this serial killer! Okay, I'm all for effective character development, but part of the character's attraction is watching this guy who has very few emotions and feelings deal with the world around him, and watching him try and emulate human emotion!! This development is almost as bad as when the producers of Star Trek gave Lt. Data an emotion chip!!
http://fxuk.com/shows/dexter
I don’t completely agree with your assessment. The central conflict in Dexter is between the fact that he is a supposedly remorseless killer (which I don’t entirely buy) and the fact that he is trying to maintain the appearance of normality through his lifestyle/career. His progression into a long-term relationship, initially as a step-father and then as a real father is central to this narrative and absolutely necessary to develop his character (which is also needed to maintain our interest). Without this, he’s just some serial killer with a fairly quirky day job and an irritating sister and I don’t believe you could spin four seasons (and counting...) out of that since you’d run out of storylines fairly quickly. It’s only really sitcoms that can get away without developing characters because the humour tends to be situational rather than character driven.
ReplyDeleteI do admit, however, that Dexter was more cutting-edge in the early seasons, probably because it was a new and original concept. We stopped watching it in season three precisely because it felt like the creators had run of decent material and the concept was no loner 'fresh'. I think that many decent US dramas tend to run out of steam well before they are actually finished (see Friends, Simpsons, TNG as prime examples) because the decision to carry on filming is commercial rather than creative. The exceptions tend to be things like Six Feet Under and The Wire which ran for exactly the number of seasons they intended in the first place and in doing so, they maintained structural and character integrity.
Good points all round. I've recently read good reports about season 4, most notably around Jon Lithgow's addition to the cast as the season's on-going serial killer. He won an Emmy for it in fact. Even so, I find the idea of Dexter with a baby too hard to fathom.
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