Dexter, torture and vigilantes

Poor old ITV. Channel 4 had 'Cheers,' 'Friends' and 'Roseanne', the BBC had 'Seinfeld' and has the very cool-looking 'Mad Men' coming up (BBC 4, Sunday, March 2). Even Channel 5 had 'House'. And what does ITV get when it sticks its new-look toe into the US import business? A peculiarly unfunny, very un-ITV series about a psychopathic serial killer who helps the police hunt psychopathic serial killers.

You can't say 'Dexter' doesn't try. The series was adapted for TV by Emmy Award-winning screenwriter James Manos Jr (he won his Emmy for the "College" episode of 'The Sopranos'). It stars Michael C Hall (David Fisher in 'Six Feet Under') as Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who works for the Miami Metro Police Department as a blood pattern analyst. And it pushes back the boundaries of good taste to a place that Mary Whitehouse would not have thought conceivable.

What is interesting about 'Dexter' is not the idea or the shock, but what it represents. First, Dexter is a descendant of Hannibal Lecter. he is inconceivable without 'Silence of the Lambs' -- the charming psychopath who does terrible things to bodies (we're hardly talking about people). The first episode is all about people being cut up for the gratification of others. Dexter captures two murderers -- one a serial killer who does terrible things to boys, the other who does terrible things to women and is into bondage and S & M. This is part of an important new trend in Anglo-American culture: a fascination with tortured and dismembered bodies.

But Dexter is no ordinary psychopath. He's charming. The kind of killer who brings doughnuts to his colleagues at the police department, the kind of psychopath who loves his sister (Debra Morgan) and girlfriend (Rita) He's a psychopath with a smile. And, here's the twist, he's a psychopath with a social conscience, he's Lecter meets Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer. he tortures and kills for the common good. If Batman got even darker than in his recent big-screen incarnations, he'd end up as Dexter. Americans were always fascinated by the idea of the rogue cop who will do anything in the name of law and order. Dirty Harry, of course, but also Popeye Doyle in 'The French Connection'. But after 9/11 this went up several notches. '24' and the American debate about Jack Bauer is the embodiment of this. Is torture justified, do the ends justify the means -- whatever the means?

So 'Dexter' brings together a whiole number of important elements of contemporary culture -- torture and inflicting pain; the serial killer; the vigilante. That's why it's interesting. The rest hardly matters. There's the usual camp humour (there is nothing on American TV that cannot now be joked about in the new post-HBO world). The inevitable URST (Unrelieved Sexual Tension), except here it's given a twist (of course), because the girlfriend doesn't want sex because she was badly raped herself. So will she, won't she? There's the multicultural police team: black police sergeant (male), Hispanic police captain (female), a Hispanic male and Dexter's foster-sister (white -- but a brunette to help us distinguish her from the blonde girlfriend). Oh, and it's set in Miami (of course). What is it about Miami and US cop shows ('Miami Vice', 'CSI - Miami')? The drugs? The Cubans? The sunshine? Gritty realism is the northeast: Chicago, New York ('NYPD Blue'), Boston ('Hill Street Blues'), Baltimore ('The Wire'). Miami offers something differtent, something kinkier, sexier, weirder.

But it's not this that's interesting about 'Dexter'. It's the way all these new dark American preoccupations meet. It may work on cable (Showtime), but what on earth is it doing on ITV? My guess is it won't be there for long. Will the home of 'Emmerdale', 'Kingdom' and 'Morse' really buy into (at least) two more series of this psychopathic kinkiness. Perhaps ITV's changing faster than we think.