Sunday night is ridiculously rich for quality TV fans. AMC gives us Mad Men each week, with Breaking Bad waiting in the wings. HBO just ended True Blood, and started Boardwalk Empire. And Showtime, beginning this weekend, returns with another season of its brilliant Dexter. With options like this, who needs broadcast TV?...
Well, I do, so long as broadcast TV, this Sunday, is rolling out some potent season premieres of its own. At 9 p.m. ET, ABC's Desperate Housewives starts its seventh season. At the same time on Fox, The Simpsons begins its 22nd season. Amazing (and still hilarious). And at 7 p.m. ET on CBS, the granddaddy of prime-time series, the still-impressive 60 Minutes, begins its 43rd season.
Forty-third!
But I digress. It's Dexter, starring Michael C. Hall as a crafty, conflicted serial killer who targets OTHER serial killers, I want to spend some time (and space) praising.
This is a show that delights in painting itself, and its protagonist, into impossible corners. Last season ended -- and I think it's ridiculous, once a show is out on DVD, to protect "spoilers," so here come some details -- with one of the most horrifying twist endings ever shown on television.
All season long, Dexter engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with another serial murderer -- the so-called Trinity Killer, played by John Lithgow, who won an Emmy for his efforts. Dexter almost killed him once, but didn't -- until the season finale, when the two killers confronted each other one last time, with Dexter emerging triumphant.
But not really. Because just before being captured and killed by Dexter, the Trinity Killer had claimed one last victim of his own: Dexter's loving wife Rita (Julie Benz), whom he killed and bled out, ritualistically, in her bathtub. Dexter found her body -- and also found their baby, crying, seated by the tub in a pool of her blood.
How horrible, but also how horribly poetic. Dexter was three when he was found, by his eventual foster-father cop, under similar circumstances. How will this next-generation trauma affect their child? And how, by visiting the sins of the father upon the son, will it affect Dexter?
Sunday's fifth season of Dexter picks up immediately where that grisly cliffhanger left off. It takes us through the police reports, the funeral plans and such -- giving us last looks at Benz's Rita, looking awful as a corpse at her own crime scene, and lovely in an open casket as her own funeral.
Except that the series isn't through yet, and gives us ADDITIONAL looks at her, courtesy of newly filmed flashbacks that are almost painfully poignant to watch.
(To hear one of them, and read and hear my review of Dexter for Friday's Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR, listen to the show Friday, or visit the website HERE after about 5 p.m. ET.)
I've seen the first three episodes of the new season, and at least twice, I was stunned and surprised, in a positive sense, by what I was seeing. And Hall, this season, gets to play new stages of grief and emotion: Just when he's learned how to feel, his feelings get crushed, and out of control. By the end of the third episode, he's got an entirely NEW problem on his hands, and I can't wait for more. Even though I'll have to.
But one element of the premiere is too good not to share, and demonstrates just how sly this show's writers and producers are.
Rita's two children from her former marriage are unaware of what happened to their mother because they were away, with their grandmother, at Walt Disney World. When they return, happy to see Dexter but wondering where their mother is, they lovingly put some Mickey Mouse ears on him -- and that's when he has to tell them the bad news.
That visual, like SO much about Dexter, is simply unforgettable.
And, so far as I'm concerned, unmissable.