Dexter

I've just finished watching the first season of Dexter, which is, let me just say, legen.......wait for it........dairy!

For those who haven't heard, Dexter is a bloke who is dead inside (emotionally speaking) and has this gripping and unavoidable urge to kill. Basically your average psychopathic serial killer. However, Dexter's foster father taught him to control his urges and use them for good not evil, so that he sates his blood lust by murdering murderers and other evildoers.

Dexter himself isn't always capable of making fine distinctions, so instead he lives by a code and never lets anyone in to see the real him.

This show is great for a number of reasons. The characters are enjoyable and watchable and relateable, you care about them and most important, they're believable. The script is tight and very entertaining. More to the point, it sucks you in. You really care about what happens and you especially care about Dexter, especially because of his flaws and the difficulties he finds living in a world where people experience emotion easily. The music is tight, but subtle, with the feel-good music really doing that, while the scary music builds the tension effortlessly. And the tension isn't from Dexter hunting down and hacking someone to death, it's from him dealing with the aftermath and more importantly, the rest of the world. The flashbacks work perfectly and are completely believable and help the story to unfold, so that the whole season fits together seamlessly and tiny details from one part relate directly to another part (ala "The Wire"). Characters speak in Spanish to each other (the series being set in Miami, with lots of Latino characters) routinely, but there's never a subtitle in sight, sometimes no translation at all.

In the last episode, the tension was incredible and Dexter was faced with this unbelievable choice. I was pretty confident that things would all work out, since they made another 2 series, but even so, I was on the edge of my seat. I totally related to the sitatuation and the character and knew what I wanted him to do, what he should do, but........ I wasn't confident that he was able to do it, he is after all a psychopathic monster masquerading as a human being.

Do yourself a favour, have a look at this show, it's tops!