I agree that the show is fantastic. The reason we can't have Dexters is the same reason we can't have authoritarian rulers. A truly good authoritarian is orders of magnitude better than a democratic system. But a bad authoritarian is orders of magnitude worse than the democratic system. So we flatten the distribution to avoid living in terrible times. A single vigilante may be good as Dexter, but without a system of accountability (government) we would have as many or more bad vigilantes as good ones and it would be a net negative for society.
If you've only watched through season 2, STOP NOW!!
If Dexter had ended there (with Dexter dead) it would go down as the best show I've watched on TV, but it continued and became just another show. I couldn't even get through more than a couple episodes of season 3.
Dexter should have remained the hardcore anti-hero the first 2 seasons presented him as, not just a misunderstood good guy the following seasons turned him into.
Dexter was a guilty pleasure for me. My critical evaluation was that it was brilliant but sick. I can’t quite feel comfortable rooting for a serial killer, even a vigilante. And eventually, like all serial fiction that continues too long past its original premise is resolved, in the later seasons they jumped the shark.
A major flaw seems inevitable; in order to make the protagonist tolerably sympathetic, they had to make it seem that he came to actually care about at least some of the people he was pretending to care about. Maybe this was supposed to be a case of the unreliable narrator, contradicting his early self-descriptions as empty and incapable of caring at his core. If so, I think they flubbed it. But the plotting and production values of the early seasons were amazing.
C&P was a set book for me in the day. I thought it overwrought in both senses. Think I may have opined in the exam that art - good or bad - often expends a great deal of effort to make a banal point. Never wanted to read it again, anyway, which is proof of the reading.
Dexter, on the other hand, was rejected a priori on the grounds that it was American decadence: the 'prurience of violence' one might say (sorry about the assonance), which appeals mainly to those who have not experienced it. Your piece may have changed my mind. I'll give it a try
it does beg an interesting question: how does one judge a show where say the first few seasons (arguably peaking with S4 finale) are great when latter seasons and particularly 8 (and the horrific continuation) are awful?
I agree that the show is fantastic. The reason we can't have Dexters is the same reason we can't have authoritarian rulers. A truly good authoritarian is orders of magnitude better than a democratic system. But a bad authoritarian is orders of magnitude worse than the democratic system. So we flatten the distribution to avoid living in terrible times. A single vigilante may be good as Dexter, but without a system of accountability (government) we would have as many or more bad vigilantes as good ones and it would be a net negative for society.
If you've only watched through season 2, STOP NOW!!
If Dexter had ended there (with Dexter dead) it would go down as the best show I've watched on TV, but it continued and became just another show. I couldn't even get through more than a couple episodes of season 3.
Dexter should have remained the hardcore anti-hero the first 2 seasons presented him as, not just a misunderstood good guy the following seasons turned him into.
Dexter was a guilty pleasure for me. My critical evaluation was that it was brilliant but sick. I can’t quite feel comfortable rooting for a serial killer, even a vigilante. And eventually, like all serial fiction that continues too long past its original premise is resolved, in the later seasons they jumped the shark.
A major flaw seems inevitable; in order to make the protagonist tolerably sympathetic, they had to make it seem that he came to actually care about at least some of the people he was pretending to care about. Maybe this was supposed to be a case of the unreliable narrator, contradicting his early self-descriptions as empty and incapable of caring at his core. If so, I think they flubbed it. But the plotting and production values of the early seasons were amazing.
C&P was a set book for me in the day. I thought it overwrought in both senses. Think I may have opined in the exam that art - good or bad - often expends a great deal of effort to make a banal point. Never wanted to read it again, anyway, which is proof of the reading.
Dexter, on the other hand, was rejected a priori on the grounds that it was American decadence: the 'prurience of violence' one might say (sorry about the assonance), which appeals mainly to those who have not experienced it. Your piece may have changed my mind. I'll give it a try
Early seasons are truly exceptional.
it does beg an interesting question: how does one judge a show where say the first few seasons (arguably peaking with S4 finale) are great when latter seasons and particularly 8 (and the horrific continuation) are awful?