In which lies are told by everyone except Simon Cowell, JamieOliver cooks tomatoes, and the 24-hour news networks look forMadeleine McCann
Like, totally psychotic[14 July 2007]
You know what I miss? Fray Bentos steak and ale pies. I haven’t had one in years. But as a student, I ate them constantly. I thought they represented grown-up cooking. After all, this wasn’t your average takeaway slop. No. A Fray Bentos supper required preparation and patience. You had to shear the lid off with a tin opener, and chuck the pie in the oven for half an hour. The end result was sublime. Except it wasn’t. Having wolfed down better, fresher meals since then, I now realise that what I was eating tasted like dog food boiled in a stomach lining by comparison. At the time I just didn’t know any better. Now I couldn’t face one. I’ve been spoiled. You can’t go home again.
I’m starting to wonder if obsessively watchingThe Wire has similarly spoiled me in terms of TV drama. By now, the sound of yet another person blasting on about how goodThe Wire is probably makes you want to yawn your soul apart, but really: it’s so absorbing, so labyrinthine and bloody-minded, it makes almost everything else seem a bit… well, a bit Fray Bentos.
TakeDexter. I’d heard a lot of positive things about it. Beyond positive, in fact: people queued up to give it a blowjob. And tickle its balls. And look it in the eye while they did so. These were people I trusted. And then I sit down to actually watch it and discover my head’s been so warped by Wirey goodness,Dexter simply gets on my wick.
The premise is as dumb as a dodgem full of monkeys. Anti-hero Dexter is a blood-spatter expert working for the Miami police department. He’s also a serial killer. But that’s okay, because he’s managed to channel and control his murderous tendencies by indulging in vaguely justifiable slayings – i.e. he only kills other serial killers.
Preposterous, yes, but there’s nothing wrong with a preposterous set-up per se. Unfortunately the show ping-pongs between quirky, tasteless comedy and what it seems to earnestly believe is a compelling study of the psychopathic mindset. It’s a bit like watching an episode ofScooby-Doo in which the lighthouse keeper who’s disguised himself as a sea monster in order to scare people away from his gold spends half his screen time mulling over the philosophical meaning of masks. And then stabs Shaggy in the eye with a toasting fork.
What’s more, the show depends on the viewer finding Dexter himself curiously charming despite the fact that he enjoys strapping his victims to a gurney and torturing them with a drill. The easiest way to achieve this is to make said victims ‘worse’ than he is. Implausibly worse. This week, for instance, Dexter’s stalking a hit-and-run drunk driver – which means he can’t be just any old drunk driver, but a serial offender who’s apparently ploughed through an orphan in every state, repeatedly beaten the rap, and then shrugged it off as no big deal.
They might as well cut to a shot of him dancing on a grave with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Enter Dexter stage left with his power drill. Cue cheering. Cut to ad break. Phew, this show is, like, intense, man. It totally toys with your sense of moral justice and shit. Awesome!
Add to that a bunch of mono-dimensional cops working alongside Dexter (including his sister, whose sole character trait is a potty mouth), an irritating voiceover that’s about one-ten
