He has a cabin cruiser and a home by the water. And a passion: He’s a serial killer.
I can image the pitch:
See, Mike, the series is a police procedural with a a twist. Yeah, it’s about this guy. He’s a serial killer. Sit down, sit down, Mike. Hear me out. But he’s not your usual serial killer, he’s a serial killer with a hear to of gold, See? He only kills serial killers. How do you like that? So, he’s really a hero. What a hook, right? And he’s handsome. He’s got a beautiful girlfriend and a house boat by the sea in Miami. I can see lots of colors. We can filter the sky and water like they do on CSI: Miami. And he listens to classical music or something. I haven’t decided yet, but it’ll be cool. He’ll be a real person. Can you see the possibilities? It’s dark. It’s edgy. And it fits right into our demographic, the people who sit there with a beer on their stomach night after night watching CSI…
If you were hesitant to acknowledge this as an age of cultural decay, hesitate no more. As proof that something is woefully wrong with our society, Showtime’s new show, Dexter, is hardly to beat. After presenting us with years of bad-boy protagonists–anti-heros, bad cops, flashy drug dealers, sexual psychopaths, Hollywood has finally drained to the dregs the old wellspring of creativity and is now in the business of glamorizing serial killers. So much for the ‘self-regulation’ of secular morality. What next, bear baiting? Snuff films? Terrorist Reality TV? (Hey, that’s an idea…)
Television has, for years, denied having any effect on the souls of those who watch it. Of course, they’re lying. If their messages didn’t affect us–didn’t make us buy, didn’t brainwash us–they wouldn’t be able to charge their advertisers millions of dollars for a 30-second ad spot. If their messages had no effect on us, the networks would be required to return every single dime of ad revenue.
I once saw a man jump to his death in a shopping mall. A crowd of shoppers pressed against the clear railings and gawked down at the police while they retrieved the body as though they were watching a television show. No one displayed the slightest sensation of alarm or shock.
I can imagine life in 20 years when the kids who’ve grown up with this shit in their lives–and it is shit–reach maturity. I can imagine and it makes me sick. You think the events at Columbine were bad.
But he has his moments. Cold. Calculating. Gruesome….
Huffy the Umpire Slayer.
No need to assume that this will be a hit series. Maybe it’ll flop, instead.
Don’t forget TV Land’s other attribute, apart from trashiness: unoriginality. This show sounds much like any given Charles Bronson vigilante movie from thirty years ago, to me. So it may not be anything we haven’t seen umpty times before.
But yes, they’re not exactly raising the bar here, are they?
WTF??
Clearly the masses are incapable of governing themselves. Let’s tear up the Bill of Rights, nationalize the airwaves, and start broadcasting only state-approved shows that convey Judeo-Christian values.
I think I’ll just take me a nice, hearty, steaming crap right here in the town well. And if you & your kids don’t like it, you can always drink elsewhere, can’t you?
I saw most of the first episode.
Not that good. A couple of “TV edgy” characters (one or two personality quirks, no real personality), a bit of gore, and a whole lot of voiceover narration by the main character telling us why he’s like he is.
Not very good, overall.
We have people whose job it is to take out serial killers.
They’re called soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
oohh…Television, something I can actually keep up on.
I haven’t seen Dexter, but I think you may be jumping the gun. First- I don’t think Dexter necessarily represents the pinnacle of a market trend, necessarily. Showtime is not exactly HBO when it comes to series production…which isn’t to say they don’t try. I don’t think of Law & Order or the CSI series (or the half-dozen other cop showson CBS, NBC, and elsewhere) really feature edgy anti-heros to even a remotely similar level. Yeah- there’s The Shield and 24…but most of the examples I can think of (the drug addict on CSI, some of the more sinister stuff on 3rd Watch) are more occasional episodic/sub-plot forays than anything else.
Second, I think it can be very easy to jump the gun and take the surface presentation of a show and assume that to be substance. On the surface, I wouldn’t have thought of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the new Battlestar Galactica as shows for a “values audience”…but I would have been wrong. Again- I haven’t seen Dexter, but is it possible it could fit into those lines (or at least be trying to)?
There’s this great invention called the remote which I use quite frequently. Even though I’m paying out the ass for hundreds of channels, I still only watch a select few. I actually find some of the stuff on Comedy Central and Adult Swim more abhorrent than this type of crap show. Have you seen the commericals for Drawn Together? Just the commericals are disgusting, I can only imagine what the show is like. Hollyweird can churn this shit out all it wants, its the viewers choice to change the channel or watch it. But hey, if it makes you feel better, if the liberals/leftards get their way, sharia law will stop all this crap anyway. We’ll have 1 state run channel telling us what to wear, think, say, believe, etc. Utopia.
Bad analogy.
First of all, the airwaves/cable/satellites are not publicly owned. They are owned by the networks and cable companies. They are more like a water company that pumps water to your house. If you don’t like the water, you can turn the pipe off. It’s no secret that the water is crappy, so it’s not like they are committing fraud.
Second of all, yes, you can drink elsewhere. You don’t have to have television in your home, and if you do, you don’t have to have it hooked up to an outside signal, and even if you do, you don’t have to watch those programs you don’t like. You have plenty of options. No one is forcing you to drink the crap.
It’s been done already by Ben Kingsley in “Suspect Zero”– and Kingsley’s character was psychic to boot! Now maybe if they’d made the guy a serial killer and psychic and a veterinarian who can talk to animals and who is a single parent and…
(continues droning on until struck with heavy blunt instrument)
Ards: I’m not even remotely suggesting censorship. I’m just suggesting that the liberal argument for self-censorhip is a fake. They don’t seem to be able to voluntarily draw any line, any line at all. Can you make a case that they observe any self-restraint?
I know I can vote with my remote, but I’m tired of being drowned in a sea of filth. I realize there’s lots of child porn that I can divert myself away from, too. But it’s absolutely wrong. So what’s the answer? Ignoring it is out of the question–to me, at least.
The subject is glorifying serial killers. The hero is a fucking serial killer. It has nothing to do with production values. Are serial killers our heros now? Where is the bottom?
What’s wrong with bear baiting?
Fargin’ bears. Deserve what they get, the lot of them.
“Grrrr!” they say, with their beady little bear eyes…
No, I can only argue that self-restraint isn’t a pre-requisite for the right to freedom of conscience, just as not giving offense isn’t a pre-requisite for the right to free speech.
Their argument is intended to counter demands for censorship. If you’re not arguing for censorship, then why does their argument bother you?
Let’s keep our apples and oranges separated. Child porn involves violating the rights of children. No one has the right to do that.
We (my family) have already answered them. We discontinued DirectTV three or four years ago, and haven’t looked back. If we hear that a show is worth watching, we order the old episodes on DVD from Netflix.
Then, if you can’t ignore it and you recognize that we shouldn’t censor it, what’s your answer?
—-
TW: Don’t support it.
Me: Good answer.
That’s a license, not a deed.
It’s not clear to me that this show necessarily represents a new low. There’s a long tradition of morally bankrupt antiheroes, and evil unreliable narrators. Murderers, many of them. Harry Flashman, Humbert Humbert, the talented Mr. Ripley, half the characters of Edgar Allen Poe, and straight on back to Oedipus.
I’m not saying that the show is any good. I have no way of knowing. But I think its premature to assume that it is glorifying murder.
Ards: Their argument bugs me because it demonstrates that general personal standards have fallen. While we can avoid exposure to it by clicking a button, doesn’t it bug you that it exists at all? What of the effect it may have on the rest of our society? What if one of your loved one were victimized by someone whose parents didn’t turn the channel? I don’t want to live in a bunker. I want society to be better.
Ted: I’m not saying it’s glorifying murder. Murder is glorified all the time in our culture. It’s glorifying serial killers. I guess I’m incapable of making that point clearly. Bad day, I guess.
I’m going over here in the corner to suck my thumb. I must be alone in this concern. What’s left in Jeff’s liquor cabinet?
Speaking as a produced tv screenwriter who’s made more pitches than I care to remember, your pitch, ahem, was too long.
All you needed was, “He’s a serial killer (cop?) who only hunts and kills serial killers.”
I think I could have probably sold a series on that alone. It wouldn’t have taken very much fleshing out, at any rate.
As for all the hysteria about “glorifying serial killers,” most of our movie and tv heroes have been killers, some of them mass killers. Sticking “serial” in front of them doesn’t really change that fact into something new and horrible.
I wish my wife would let me get Showtime. Then I could get all worked up about this, too.
As it is, I’ll stick to watching old Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. Now there’s an anti-hero you could really get behind!
A Philosophical Investigation was pretty original. This, not so much.
Heard about this from a freind’s dad. Turns out he had read the novels that the series is going to be based on.
More or less, what is going on is that it is a vigilante crime drama with a twist– the hero is portrayed as a serial killer.
If we’re going to take the phrase ‘Serial Killer’ literally, and make it to mean ‘someone who kills, not groups, but people over time’ it could mean lots of people that aren’t what the police would call ‘serial killers’.
So he’s got some level of an anti-social personality. Now, just because he’s a vigilante, he’s a serial killer.
My problem? Moral equivalence. In my mind, a man who kills serial killers, even illegaly, is a far better man than a serial killer. End of story. Its not right to do so, but its way more honorable.
Calling him a serial killer is just a bit promotional razzle-dazzle done by someone who doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what they are implying.
I don’t watch T.V… so… this changes everything about nothing for me
TW: Data indicates that TV is crap. Next!
Not from the series, at any rate.
In this case, he’s a serial killer who preys on other serial killers, for actual serial killer type reasons. He just ended up as a forensics guy who’s really good at analyzing blood spatters.
Sure, he kills bad guys, but he’s certainly not portrayed as heroic in any typical sense. He’s not killing these guys because he’s a vigilante, he’s killing them because he likes killing people, and serial killers are just his preferred targets (there’s a certain amount of professional pride and jealousy in there, as well, and he has limits in that he won’t kill children).
Ahem: Actually, I agree with you that personal standards have fallen, and it bugs me that crap like this is being made. I don’t worry about its effect on society, though, because I see it as the symptom rather than the illness. If our society were healthy, crap like this would never be made.
Question: Did you go to see Silence of the Lambs? That movie hasn’t made one penny off of me. The whole idea of it disgusts me. What about Kill Bill? Have you seen Reservoir Dogs? Pulp Fiction? Name your favorite violent/gory movie of the past 10-20 years, and I can almost guarantee that I haven’t seen it. I don’t like gory, nihilistic movies.
That’s why it irritated me to read the crack about “secular morality.” There’s nothing wrong with my morality. Ninety-five percent of the people in the US, though, claim to believe in a God. Hollywood isn’t supported entirely off of the other five percent.